The superyacht where Jackie Kennedy found new love can be yours for 42% off

Shipowner Aristotle Onassis and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis onboard the Christina yacht on March. 18, 1969. (STAFF/AFP via Getty Images)

To board the yacht named Christina, in the glamorous late middle of the 20th century, was to float amid the highest levels of fame, celebrity and royalty: Winston Churchill! Liza Minnelli! Rudolf Nureyev! Its owner, the Greek shipping magnate and definitive international playboy Aristotle Onassis, equipped it with a lapis lazuli fireplace, an onyx spiral staircase, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that ascended to become a dance floor, and barstools upholstered in whale-penis leather.

This was where Onassis wooed the already-married Maria Callas, who would become his romantic partner for years, and later courted the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, who became Jackie Onassis in 1968. After their Greek island wedding, it was the Christina that hosted the reception.

Now the Christina, currently known as the Christina O, is on sale for nearly half off — its asking price slashed to 52 million euros (or roughly US$60 million) from an initial 90 million euros, convertible pool and original bar furniture included. In today’s market, it’s still a tough sell.

“We had some interest, but no deal went through,” Tim Morley, the broker handling the sale, said on the phone from Nafplion, Greece, at the Mediterranean Yacht Show. While the late Irish businessman Ivor Fitzpatrick, who owned the yacht for the past few years, had loved owning it, his widow, Susan, has lowered the price with the goal of moving it more quickly. “It’s not her passion, and she has multiple businesses,” Morley said. “And so she wants it to go to another person who will look after it for the next chapter.”

The headwinds have come from a convergence of current events and the yacht’s own history. It’s an uncertain moment for selling luxury vessels in general, because of war in Eastern Europe, war in the Middle East, and a slumping economy in Europe thanks to both, Julia Skop of the Monaco-based yacht brokerage Smart Yachts said. And though the yacht is in fine shape and is an imposing 325 feet long, its old-fashioned proportions and Onassis’s designs for a hospitality-first party palace don’t necessarily match the preferences of today’s ultra-rich.

But the ship has been on steep discount before. It was launched as the Canadian River-class frigate HMCS Stormont in 1943 at the height of World War II, where it served in the Battle of the Atlantic and the D-Day landings at Normandy. After the war, though, the Canadian Navy needed to downsize, and Onassis bought it for $34,000, which was the scrap value at the time.

He then proceeded to pour $4 million (nearly $50 million, adjusted for inflation) into converting it into his dream yacht, which he named after his daughter, Christina. There had been ostentatious boats before — automobile millionaire Henry Dodge had commissioned the luxurious but smaller SS Delphine in the 1920s — but Onassis brought floating plutocratic potency into a whole new age. “The world press, it just went nuts with the whole thing of the Christina,” Morley said, “because she was the ultimate symbol of opulence and glamour.”

Still, the memory of past romance hasn’t yet been enough to overcome the realities of the yacht business in 2026. In the aftermath of Covid, a sales boom cleared out shipyards, Skop said, till “they were telling you okay, come back in 2026, 2027.” Now inventory has recovered, and on the resale market, Skop said, “we are approaching a buyer’s market now.”

That said, it’s likely that yachts like the Christina O will find buyers soon, Skop said.

“The world is still full of rich people,” Skop said. “We are going to see some big transactions in the next two or three years, for sure.”

In the meantime, she said, many Russian buyers have dropped out of the market since the invasion of Ukraine, and the war on Iran has left Middle Eastern buyers wary of making major commitments. And in a business where shoppers are seeking the fanciest, most advanced features, a long history, no matter how fabled, can be a liability.

“They see the year of construction,” Morley said, “and they kind of feed that into their own internal calculations of depreciation and what old boats sell for, because there are a bunch of old boats kicking around from the ’50s and ’60s.”

The relationship between the contemporary Christina O and Aristotle Onassis’s Christina, though, recalls the Ship of Theseus. After Aristotle Onassis died in 1975, his will offered it to Christina or Jacqueline, if either wanted it, or to the Greek government if not. His daughter and his widow both declined, and the ship passed on to the government, which renamed it the Argo before quickly giving up on using it.

It languished, rusting for decades at a Greek naval base near Piraeus. It was found there, nearly submerged, by Costas Karabela, a shipbuilder who set about rescuing and restoring it.

The process was the shipbuilding equivalent of tearing a house down to the studs. The surviving luxury fittings were removed and most of the original steel hull was replaced, its old wartime rivet work replaced with modern welding. When it was finished in 2001, the ship had new diesel engines in place of its old steam ones, new generators and new almost everything else, save a few preserved parts like the rudder blade and anchor windlass. It also had the O tacked on to its name.

Onassis’s onyx stairway made it back into the ship. So did the barstools, with their whale-tooth footrests and their original whale-skin upholstery. Though Onassis, who was briefly a whaler, insisted on informing guests that they were sitting on whale foreskin or whale scrotum, cetacean male genitalia lack scrotums and foreskins alike.

Still, if the specific parts may have been mythologized, historian Thomas Fleischman at the University of Rochester said the anatomical gist was right. “The only part of the whale that could be rendered into upholstery was the penis,” Fleischman said.

Even aside from Onassis’s remaining decor choices, the updated Christina O still isn’t optimized for contemporary customers. Its shape — originally designed for speed in naval warfare — is narrow, with much less interior volume than a 21st century superyacht of the same length.

Onassis also gave the Christina an abundance of staterooms to accommodate his many guests. The renovation added even more, bringing the total to 17.

Technically, under International Maritime Organization rules, this means that the world’s most famous yacht doesn’t even count as a yacht. Yachts are capped at 12 passengers; the Christina O, with the ability to carry nearly three times that many, is officially classified as a passenger vessel.

Since its rebuilding, the Christina O has been operating as a high-end charter boat, available for around 700,000 euros a week. Heidi Klum hired it for her wedding to her third husband, Tom Kaulitz, in Capri in 2019. Sitting at anchor, it is allowed to hold as many as 157 guests. “Literally no other yacht can do that,” Morley said.

The atmosphere of the ship “brings out a spirit of performance and fun” Morley said.

“When people go on board, everybody has — you know, they feel this emotional reaction,” Morley said. “And it’s a different experience. It’s almost, I would say magical.”

For now the Christina O keeps giving well-off tourists and wedding parties a short-term sample of the rarefied life while it waits to find a new owner, someone who wants a yacht that comes with more of a story than rich guy buys boat. Greek shipping tycoons, Morley said, may be intrigued by the glory of owning Onassis’s yacht; Middle Eastern oil magnates could have the means to buy a pricey piece of history.

But Americans, he said, are particularly attached to charter boats, and particularly drawn to the Kennedy aura. “Americans, when they come on the boat, they really love it,” Morley said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if an American buyer is probably the most likely.”

Michael Ballaban, CNN