Kaliakra

A sail training ship for Bulgarian officer cadets from the three navigation schools at Varna on the Black Sea, sailing educational voyages in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and also available to youth organisations.

Despite the long trip involved she has taken part in the Tall Ships Races since 1986: the North Sea race of 1986, Baltic regattas in 1987 and 1988, the bicentenary of the French Revolution at Rouen, the final event of the tall ships races in Hamburg and the 1990 Plymouth – La Coruña – Bordeaux regatta. Then came the Columbus Regatta of 1992, the 1996 Mediterranean Tall Ships Race, 1997 Aberdeen – Trondheim – Bergen – Stavanger – Gothenburg, 1998 Falmouth – Lisbon – Vigo – Dublin, Tall Ships 2000 at Genoa and Cádiz, 2001 Antwerp – Ålesund and Bergen – Esbjerg (where she was awarded ISTA's Peter and Simon Krouter Memorial Trophy for the most impressive, skilled and well-trained crew), 2002 Alicante – Málaga – La Coruña – Santander – Portsmouth, 2006 Saint-Malo – Lisbon – Cádiz – La Coruña – Antwerp, 2007 Barcelona – Genoa – Toulon – Alicante, 2008 Liverpool – Måløy – Bergen – Den Helder along with Sail Bremerhaven, 2009 Gdynia – St Petersburg – Turku – Klaipėda along with the Hanse Sail Rostock, and in 2010 the Garibaldi Tall Ships Race and the Historical Seas Tall Ships Regatta in the Mediterranean.

For economic reasons she has been taken out of operation from time to time; in 2011 she did not leave her home region at all.

A square stern is a characteristic feature of these Polish-designed and Polish-built ships. The plan for the class was drawn up by the famous Polish designer Zygmunt Choreń; the Polish barquentines Pogoria (1980) and Iskra II (1982) and Oceania (1985), with her three-masted experimental rig, share a similar hull.

She is named in honour of a legendary Bulgarian girl who, rather than be converted to Islam by the Turkish occupying forces in the fourteenth century, took her own life at Cape Kaliakra on the northern Bulgarian Black Sea coast.