Ivan Franko, first Club Méditerranée cruise ship 1965/1966

The Ivan Franko

Location: Sea, Ocean
Village Type: Cruise Ship
Opening Date: December 1965
Closing Year: April 1966

For the record: The daily newspaper Le Monde of October 6, 1965, headlined CRUISES AT 100 FRANCS PER DAY “ALL INCLUSIVE” ON THE “IVAN-FRANKO” WITH THE CLUB MÉDITERRANÉE

Club Méditerranée and the sea have always worked hand in hand. The former is drawn to the latter. To further explore the sea and offer GMs new adventures, the Club launched Odysseys in the late 1950s. These Odysseys are tours of the Mediterranean aboard caiques.

In 1965, companies like Messageries Marmites and Paquet were looking for ways to operate their lines in a much more tourist-oriented way. The only drawback was that the existing boats were divided into classes, and this didn't interest the Club at all. It was necessary to find a boat on which it would be easy to transpose the organizational method that had made the Club's villages so successful. The Club found this much-sought-after ship in Marseille in the spring of 1965. Like a gift from heaven, a ship flying the Soviet flag made a stopover in the Phocaean port. Its name: Ivan Franko. Its strengths: the number of passengers it could carry, its level of comfort, and above all, the fact that it had only one class. In short, the ship was tailor-made for the Club. In October 1965, the Club secured exclusivity of the Ivan Franko for nearly four months and announced it with great fanfare to the entire press invited to Genoa to discover the ship.

The ship has five bars, a cinema with 120 seats, a games room, a music room, a library, a discotheque, a night club, a swimming pool and a children's pool, two orchestras, in short, a real floating club village! The passenger cabins all had air conditioning, a telephone and, at least, a bathroom. They differed, however, in the number of berths installed (2, 3 or even 4 berths). The 4-person cabins had bunk beds while the others had separate beds. Note that a 50% discount on the price of the stay is offered to GMs sharing a 4-berth cabin if they register together.

The price of the 1965 Christmas cruise was 1480 francs (or €2280 if we take into account monetary erosion due to inflation...) for 15 days in the Mediterranean, which comes to 98 francs per day, all inclusive except for extras like the bar.

On the onboard team side, GOs and GEs from the summer villages are part of the onboard staff. Since the ship is Soviet, it is obvious that the crew running the boat is Russian and speaks Russian. Faced with this language barrier, the Club has a solution: Natacha KANINE. Of Russian origin through her parents, loyal to the Tsar, they came to France in 1920, like many others. She joined the Club in 1955 in Golfo di Barratti at the suggestion of Dimitri PHILIPPOFF, a friend of the family. She rose to the rank of village chief a few years later. Her career at the Club ended in 1986.
Fluent in Russian, Natacha KANINE on the Ivan Franko was the solution.

During the charter season, from December to April (which corresponds to a season in a winter village in the mountains), ten cruises are scheduled from Marseille (with train transfer from Paris): six cruises of eight to ten days and three cruises of twelve to fifteen days in the Mediterranean basin, a final cruise of one month to the Antilles.
For the latter, the price is 2,960 F per person, which is still around 100 francs per day.

An anecdote comes to mind concerning this final cruise: upon arriving in Fort-de-France, the entire Russian crew was seen standing at attention, hoisting the Soviet flag and singing the Internationale. Soviet tradition or provocation (let's not forget that we were, at that time, in the middle of the Cold War). This scene caused a veritable commotion at the prefecture. The prefect, accompanied by the police, went to the scene of the crime and informed the commander of the Ivan Franko that docking in the port was forbidden.

On December 20th in Marseille, the Ivan Franko weighed anchor at 9 a.m. Destination: Beirut, Alexandria, Piraeus… and returned to Marseille on January 3rd, 1966, at 6 a.m. This would be the first cruise in the history of Club Méditerranée outside of Odysseys on a caïque or the Djerba with Koko Chaze.