| IMO | 9895240 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 10,617 GT |
| Length | 113.5 m |
| Beam | 24.3 m |
| Passenger capacity (double) | 152 |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 198 |
| Crew | 120 |
| Service speed | 12.0 knots |
| Builder | Helsinki Shipyard |
| Yard | Helsinki |
| Launched | 2021 |
| Maiden voyage | 2021-12-03 |
| Operator | Swan Hellenic |
| Status | Active |
Overview
SH Minerva is a small ice-class expedition cruise ship built in Finland for the revived Swan Hellenic brand and delivered at the end of 2021. She was the first of three new ships ordered from Helsinki Shipyard to relaunch a name with a long history in cultural, destination-led cruising, and her name deliberately recalled Swan Hellenic's first purpose-built vessel, Minerva — after Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and creativity. She is a different, later hull from that earlier Minerva, an entirely separate ship covered elsewhere in this directory.
Her career divides sharply in two. She entered service on schedule in December 2021 and went straight to Antarctica, then spent most of the next three years laid up in Uruguay — not because anything was wrong with the ship, but because sanctions imposed on her leasing owner after Russia's invasion of Ukraine froze her legal position. Swan Hellenic finally bought her outright in July 2025 and returned her to the fleet. Few nearly-new cruise ships have a biography so completely shaped by events that had nothing to do with cruising.
Key specifications
The dataset records SH Minerva at 10,617 gross tons, 113.5 metres long and 24.3 metres in beam, carrying 152 guests with a crew of 120, at a speed of 12.0 knots. Swan Hellenic's own press material rounds the tonnage to 10,500 and describes the same ship; the dataset figure is the registered figure and is the one used here. The 152 guests are accommodated in 76 cabins and suites, most with balconies, figures consistent across the line's delivery announcements and the dataset's capacity and crew numbers.
The technical core, as described at delivery, is a diesel-electric propulsion system with selective catalytic reduction, a PC5 ice-strengthened hull, extra-large stabilisers and Safe Return to Port certification. She was designed to be self-sufficient for up to 40 days or 8,000 nautical miles, with exhaust-gas cleaning, advanced wastewater treatment and waste storage for sensitive polar areas, and preparations for battery installation allowing silent sailing in port and wildlife reserves. Published power figures vary — 5 megawatts in delivery reporting, 4.6 megawatts hybrid in earlier coverage — apparently reflecting installed versus hybrid-package descriptions.
Design and construction
SH Minerva was built by Helsinki Shipyard at Helsinki, the first of three ships the yard built for Swan Hellenic. Her keel-laying ceremony set the first 347-ton block — outfitted and painted at Klaipėda before shipment to Helsinki — over coins for luck; because it fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, the principals took part partly by video link. She was floated out on 23 June 2021; her twin, the future SH Vega, was floated in the same dock the same day, an economical piece of series building that shows how closely the pair were matched.
The brief was worldwide expedition cruising with a strong bias towards high latitudes: luxurious enough for Swan Hellenic's returning clientele, tough enough for polar work, rather than a conventional cruise ship with an ice notation added. Hence the PC5 hull, the long self-sufficiency range, and expedition facilities — zodiac boarding areas, a laboratory and a library — designed in from the start, against a passenger count held deliberately to 152.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
The name was announced at the keel-laying as a deliberate act of continuity: the relaunched Swan Hellenic would bring the brand back, in chief executive Andrea Zito's words, with the name of its first purpose-built ship. She was christened at Helsinki Shipyard on 23 November 2021 and delivered on 3 December, after three days of sea trials in which, the line reported, she performed beyond expectations. She left Helsinki immediately, transited the Kiel Canal on 6 December, and sailed for Ushuaia.
Her maiden voyage was a ten-day Antarctic expedition over the New Year, departing Ushuaia on 29 December 2021. A longer inaugural itinerary had originally been advertised for earlier in December; the delivered ship's first revenue sailing was the New Year voyage the delivery reporting describes.
Career by operator
SH Minerva has only ever been operated by Swan Hellenic, and has carried only one name. What changed during her career was not her operator but her ownership and her availability to that operator, and the table below should be read with the notes that follow it.
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2021–present | SH Minerva | Swan Hellenic |
As delivered, the ship was not owned by Swan Hellenic. She was chartered from STLC Europe Nine Leasing Ltd, an Irish company whose parent, GTLK Europe DAC, was a subsidiary of the Russian state leasing giant PAO GTLK. When the EU, US and UK sanctioned that parent in 2022, the charter structure collapsed under her. After only a few months in service she was laid up at Fray Bentos, Uruguay, from April 2022.
GTLK Europe DAC went into liquidation in May 2023, and joint liquidators appointed by the High Court of Ireland took control. After lengthy negotiations to establish that a sale complied with all applicable sanctions, Swan Hellenic reacquired the ship on 25 July 2025, using shareholders' funds. Following maintenance, she was scheduled to return to service from Ushuaia in November 2025 — a three-and-a-half-year absence for a ship that had served barely four months when she was laid up.
Onboard character
In design terms, SH Minerva was Swan Hellenic's argument that its historic formula — cultural expedition cruising, expert-led and deliberately unrepetitive — needed a purpose-built ship rather than another charter conversion. The era-defining choices were made at the drawing board: 152 guests in 76 relatively large cabins, most with balconies; a crew of 120, giving a tonnage-per-guest figure the line boasted was among the highest in its category; and public rooms planned around the expedition day — observation lounge, club lounge, library, laboratory, and zodiac staging areas with lockers.
The styling was described at debut as Scandinavian-influenced and five-star, but the durable point is functional: luxury measured in space, quiet and expertise per guest rather than variety of venues. That positioned her consciously at the cultural, lecture-rich end of the early-2020s expedition market that Swan Hellenic had occupied since the 1950s.
Major refits and incidents
No refit, conversion or casualty is recorded for SH Minerva in the sources consulted. Her Uruguayan lay-up was a legal and financial event, not a technical one, and her 2025 return required, in the line's description, routine maintenance and preparation rather than rebuilding — unsurprising for a ship that had seen only months of service before lay-up.
The one operational episode of note from her brief first career was a rescue rather than an incident involving the ship herself: in January 2022, with an Antarctic expedition party facing the loss of its planned pick-up as operators cancelled around it, SH Minerva altered her programme to take the party off the ice and carry it back towards Ushuaia — an early demonstration of the flexibility a small, ice-classed ship exists to provide.
Sister ships and class
SH Minerva is the first of three Helsinki-built ships for Swan Hellenic, described at delivery as the Vega class. Her true twin is SH Vega, floated alongside her in June 2021 and delivered in 2022 to essentially the same design and 152-guest capacity. The third ship, SH Diana, is a slightly larger development of the same platform. All three share the lead ship's language: diesel-electric propulsion with selective catalytic reduction, PC5 ice strengthening, Safe Return to Port certification and battery-ready provision.
The class also marked Finnish-built small expedition ships as a distinct strand of the early-2020s newbuild wave, alongside the Chinese-built X-BOW ships and the Portuguese-built ships entering service in the same years — three national answers to the same question.
Fate and where she is now
The dataset lists SH Minerva as active and operating, and after her July 2025 reacquisition that description is once again straightforward: she is Swan Hellenic's ship in law as well as in livery, bought outright from the liquidators of her former leasing owner, and returned to the three-ship fleet alongside SH Vega and SH Diana. Her biography so far is a reminder that a cruise ship's fate can be decided in sanctions regulations and liquidation hearings as surely as in shipyards — and that a nearly-new ship, properly laid up, can wait out three years of legal limbo and come back as her operator's flagship.
Sources: https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2021/12/swan-hellenic-takes-delivery-of-minerva/, https://www.marinelink.com/amp/news/swan-hellenic-takes-delivery-new-cruise-492921, https://www.cruisemapper.com/news/15093-sh-minerva-rejoins-swan-hellenic-fleet, https://www.swanhellenic.com/latest-news/SH_Minerva_floated_out