Greek battleship Spetsai

300px Spetsai - Θ/Κ Σπέτσαι
Career (Greece)	60px
Namesake:	Spetsai Island
Ordered:	1885
Builder:	Havre Shipyards
Launched:	1889
Commissioned:	1890
Decommissioned:	1920
Fate:	sold for scrap
General characteristics
Displacement:	Standard 4,885 tons
Length:	103 m
Beam:	15.8 m
Draft:	6.4 m
Propulsion:	2 steam engines
Speed:	17.5-knot (32 km/h) maximum
Armament:	3 x 270 mm guns 1 x 150 mm gun 1 x 100 mm gun 3 x 6-inch (152 mm)
Armour:	12-30 cm on the hull 7.5 cm on the deck

The Spetsai (Greek: Θ/Κ Σπέτσαι) was a Greek steel battleship serving in the Royal Hellenic Navy from 1890 until 1920. She was named after the Saronic Gulf island of Spetses, which played a key role in the war at sea during the Greek War of Independence.

The ship, along with her two sister ships of the Hydra Class, was ordered from France in 1885 during the premiership of Charilaos Trikoupis, as part of a wider reorganization and modernization of the Hellenic armed forces, which had proved themselves inadequate during the Cretan uprising of 1866 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

The ship saw limited action in the Greco-Turkish War (1897), as the Royal Hellenic Navy failed to make use of its superiority over the Ottoman Navy. By the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912, Spetsai, along with her sister ships, was antiquated, but she did take part in the war, in which Greece liberated the islands of the Eastern Aegean and defeated Ottoman Turkey in the two decisive naval battles of Elli and Lemnos.

During World War I, Greece belatedly entered the war on the side of the Entente and the Hydra Class ships served as coastal defense. She was decommissioned in 1920 and used as a naval communications school until 1929, when she was scrapped.

See also

• History of the Hellenic Navy