and aft of the main armor belt to the bow and stern. Construction and career Navarin, named after the Battle of Navarino, was ordered on 24 April 1889 from the Franco-Russian Works and construction began on 13 July 1889 at their Saint Petersburg shipyard. The ship was laid down on 31 May 1890 and launched on 20 October 1891. She was transferred to Kronstadt in 1893 for fitting out, but did not enter service until June 1896 at a cost of over nine million rubles. Construction was seriously delayed by problems with the boilers and late deliveries of armor plates, the gun mountings, and other components, compounded by inefficiencies in building. One example of such was that the Russian armor plate company lacked the capacity to make gun port armor for the gun turrets of the required thickness, but the builder somehow lost track of this fact and had to place a rush order with the French company of St. Chamond. Navarin was assigned to the Baltic Fleet and began a cruise to the Mediterranean Sea in August 1896. She visited the Greek port of Piraeus on 1 October. Together with the battleship , the ship was ordered to the Far East in early 1898 and arrived at Port Arthur on 28 March. She took part in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion two years later. Navarin and Sissoi Veliky, together with a number of cruisers, sailed for the Baltic on 25 December 1901 and arrived at the port of Libau in early May 1902. She began a refit the following September that was interrupted by the start of the Russo-Japanese War in February 1904. During this refit, Navarin received Barr & Stroud rangefinders, telescopic gun sights and Telefunken radio equipment. Her light armament was increased by four guns that displaced an equal number of 47-millimeter guns on top of the superstructure; one of the displaced guns was mounted on each of the turret roofs. On 15 October 1904, she set sail for Port Arthur from Libau along with the other vessels of the Second Pacific Squadron, under the command of Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. When his ships reached the port of Tangier, Morocco, on 28 October, Rozhestvensky split his forces and ordered his older ships, including Navarin and Sissoi Veliky, to proceed through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to rendezvous with him in Madagascar as previously planned. Under the