Ottoman ironclad Asar-i Şevket

Asar-i Şevket (Ottoman Turkish: Work of God) was a central battery ship built for the Ottoman Navy in the 1860s. Originally ordered by the Khedivate of Egypt but confiscated by the Ottoman Empire while under construction, the vessel was initially named Kahira.

Design
Asar-i Şevket was 66.4 m long overall, with a beam of 12.9 m and a draft of 5 m. The hull was constructed with iron, incorporated ram bow and a partial double bottom. She displaced 2047 MT normally. She had a crew of 170 officers and enlisted men.

The ship was powered by a single horizontal compound engine which drove a single screw propeller. Steam was provided by four coal-fired box boilers that were trunked into a single funnel amidships. The engine was rated at 1750 ihp and produced a top speed of 12 kn, though by 1877 she was only capable of 8 kn. Asar-i Şevket carried 300 MT of coal. A supplementary brig rig was also fitted.

Asar-i Şevket was armed with a battery of one 9 in muzzle loading Armstrong gun and four 7 in Armstrong guns. The 178 mm guns were mounted in a central, armored battery, with the 229 mm gun on top in an open barbette mount. The ship's armored belt consisted of wrought iron that was 6 in thick and was reduced to 4.5 in toward the bow and stern. Above the main belt, a strake of armor 114 mm thick protected the central battery, and the same thickness was used for the barbette.

Service history
Asar-i Şevket was originally ordered by the Khedivate of Egypt in 1866 from the French Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard in Bordeaux under the name Kahira. Her keel was laid down in 1867, and she was launched the following year. On 29 August 1868, the Ottoman Empire forced Egypt to surrender the ship, which was then renamed Asar-i Şevket and commissioned into the Ottoman Navy on 3 March 1870.

Russo-Turkish War
The Ottoman fleet began mobilizing in September 1876 to begun prepare for a conflict with Russia, as tensions with the country had been growing for several years, an insurrection had begun in Ottoman Bosnia in mid-1875, and Serbia had declared war on the Ottoman Empire in July 1876. The Russo-Turkish War began on 24 April 1877 with a Russian declaration of war. Asar-i Şevket spent the war in the Black Sea squadron, with the bulk of the Ottoman ironclad fleet. The Ottoman fleet, commanded by Hobart Pasha, was vastly superior to the Russian Black Sea Fleet; the only ironclads the Russians possessed there were RUSSIAN MONITOR Vitse-admiral Popov and RUSSIAN MONITOR Novgorod, circular vessels that had proved to be useless in service. The presence of the fleet did force the Russians to keep two corps in reserve for coastal defense, but the Ottoman high command failed to make use of its naval superiority in a more meaningful way, particularly to hinder the Russian advance into the Balkans. Hobart Pasha took the fleet to the western Black Sea, where he was able to make a more aggressive use of it to support the Ottoman forces battling the Russians in the Caucasus. The fleet bombarded Poti and assisted in the defense of Batumi.

In May, Asar-i Şevket, the steam frigate OTTOMAN FRIGATE Mubir-i Sürur, and several transport ships steamed to Batumi. Over the course of the war, Russian torpedo boats made several attacks on the vessels stationed in Batumi, but Asar-i Şevket was not damaged in any of them. By the end of June, Asar-i Şevket was transferred to the port of Sulina at the mouth of the Danube, along with the ironclads OTTOMAN IRONCLAD Muin-i Zafer and OTTOMAN IRONCLAD Hifz-ur Rahman. The ships were tasked with defending the seaward approach to the port, supporting three coastal fortifications.

Later career
After the end of the war in 1878, Asar-i Şevket was laid up in Constantinople. This was in part due to chronically low budgets, and in part due to the fact that the Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who had come to power after a coup that involved senior members of the Navy had deposed Murad V, distrusted the Navy. In 1890, the ship was taken to the Imperial Arsenal for refitting, and new boilers were installed. The ship also received a battery of light guns, including two 87 mm Krupp guns, two 63.5 mm Krupp guns, two 37 mm Hotchkiss revolver cannon, and one 25.4 mm Nordenfelt gun. The ship returned to service on 12 February 1892.

At the start of the Greco-Turkish War in February 1897, the Ottomans inspected the fleet and found that almost all of the vessels, including Avnillah, to be completely unfit for combat against the Greek Navy. Many of the ships have rotted hulls and their crews are poorly trained. Through April and May, elements the Ottoman fleet made several sorties into the Aegean Sea in an attempt to raise morale among the ships' crews, though the Ottomans had no intention of attacking Greek forces. During these operations, Asar-i Şevket and the rest of the ironclad fleet ventured no further than Naga, the narrowest point of the Dardanelles. The condition of the Ottoman fleet could not be concealed from foreign observers, which proved to be an embarrassment for the government and finally forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to authorize a modernization program, which recommended that the ironclads be modernized in foreign shipyards. German firms, including Krupp, Schichau-Werke, and AG Vulcan, were to rebuild the ships, but after having surveyed the ships, withdrew from the project in December 1897 owing to the impracticality of modernizing the ships and the inability of the Ottoman government to pay for the work. By 1900, the contracts were finally awarded, and Asar-i Şevket was not included in the program. Instead, the ship was decommissioned in 1903 and was ultimately sold to ship breakers on 31 July 1909.