page_title: Russian battleship Imperatritsa Mariya
section_title: Service
hierarchical_section_title: Russian battleship Imperatritsa Mariya / Service
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Линейный корабль Императрица Мария после постановки в док и откачки воды, 1919 год.
context_page_description: Imperatritsa Mariya was one of three Imperatritsa Mariya-class dreadnoughts built for the Imperial Russian Navy, lead ship of her class. Construction began before World War I and she served with the Black Sea Fleet during the war. She covered older pre-dreadnought battleships as they bombarded Ottoman facilities in 1915 and engaged the Ottoman light cruiser Midilli, several times without inflicting anything more serious than splinter damage. Imperatritsa Mariya was sunk at anchor in Sevastopol by a magazine explosion in late 1916, killing 228 crewmen. She was subsequently raised, but her condition was very poor. She was finally scrapped in 1926.
context_section_description: Imperatritsa Mariya, named after Tsarina Maria Feodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, was built by the Russud Shipyard at Nikolayev, Russian Empire. She was laid down on 30 October 1911 along with her sister ships Imperator Aleksander III and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya, but this was merely a ceremonial event as the design had not yet been finalized nor the contract signed. She was launched on 19 October 1913 and arrived in Sevastopol on 13 July 1915, where she completed her fitting out during the next few months and conducted sea trials. On 1 October she provided cover for the Black Sea Fleet's pre-dreadnoughts as they bombarded targets in Kozlu, Zonguldak and Karadeniz Ereğli. She did much the same when older battleships bombarded targets in Bulgaria on 20–22 October and then Varna itself on 27 October. The light cruiser Midilli narrowly escaped a running engagement with the Imperatritsa Mariya on 4 April 1916 as the battleship narrowly missed her several times before she could disengage. Three months later both Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya, alerted by intercepted radio transmissions, sortied from Sevastopol in an attempt to intercept the ex-German battlecruiser Yavuz as she returned from a bombardment of the Russian port of Tuapse on 4 July. The Yavuz dodged north and avoided the Russians by paralleling the Bulgarian coastline back to the Bosphorus. The Midilli mined the harbor of Novorossiysk on 21 July, but the Russians, again alerted by radio intercepts, attempted to catch her on her return journey. Midilli was lured into range of Imperatritsa Mariya's guns the next day when the cruiser pursued the Russian destroyer Schastlivy, but she managed to escape with only splinter damage.
  On the morning of 20 October 1916, a fire was discovered in the Imperatritsa Mariya's forward powder magazine while at anchor in Sevastopol, but it exploded before any efforts could be made to fight the fire. Sailors led by Engineer-Mechanic Midshipman Ignatyev, however, managed to flood the forward shell magazine before the explosion at the cost of their own lives. Their action probably prevented a catastrophic detonation and all of the other magazines were flooded as a precaution. About forty minutes after the first explosion, a second occurred in the vicinity of the torpedo compartment that destroyed the watertight integrity of the rest of the forward bulkheads. Imperatritsa Mariya began to sink by the bow and listed to starboard. She capsized a few minutes later, taking 228 sailors with her. The subsequent investigation determined that the explosion was probably the result of spontaneous combustion of the nitrocellulose-based propellant as it decomposed.
  Following a complex salvage operation, the ship was eventually refloated on 18 May 1918 and moved into Sevastopol's Northern Dry Dock on 31 May, still upside down. The chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, prevented further repair work, although her 130 mm guns were removed. By 1923, the wooden blocks supporting her in place were rotting.  She was floated out and grounded in shallow water in 1923. She was approved for scrapping in June 1925 and officially stricken on 21 November 1925, although the work did not begin until 1926 when she was refloated and moved back into the dry dock. Her gun turrets, which had fallen out of the ship when she capsized, were later salvaged. Two of them were used as the 30th Coast Defense Battery defending the city during the Siege of Sevastopol in World War II.
caption: Hull of the Imperatritsa Mariya in 1919 after salvage
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