Ottoman ironclad Lüft-ü Celil

Lüft-ü Celil (Ottoman Turkish: Divine Grace) was an ironclad warship of the Ottoman Navy, the lead ship of the.

Design
Lüft-ü Celil was 64.4 m long overall, with a beam of 13.6 m and a draft of 4.4 m. The hull was constructed with iron, incorporated ram bow, and displaced 2540 MT normally and 1741 MT BOM. She had a crew of 12 officers and 110 enlisted men.

The ship was powered by a single horizontal compound engine which drove two screw propellers. Steam was provided by two coal-fired locomotive boilers that were trunked into a single funnel amidships. The engine was rated at 2000 ihp and produced a top speed of 12 kn, though by 1877 she was only capable of 10 kn. Lüft-ü Celil carried 300 MT of coal. A supplementary barque rig was also fitted.

Lüft-ü Celil was armed with a battery of two 225 mm muzzle loading Armstrong guns and two 178 mm Armstrong guns, each pair mounted in a revolving gun turret, both of which were on the centerline. The 225 mm guns were placed in the forward turret and the turret for the 178 mm guns was located aft of the main mast. The ship's armored belt consisted of wrought iron that was 5.5 in thick and was reduced to 4.6 in toward the bow and stern. Above the main belt, a strake of armor 3 in thick protected the turret bases, magazines, and machinery spaces. The turrets were protected by 140 mm of iron plating.

Service history
Lüft-ü Celil was ordered from the Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard in Bordeaux in 1867 and was laid down the following year. She was launched in 1869 and completed for sea trials in 1870. The ship had originally been ordered by the Khedivate of Egypt, a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, but the vessel was formally transferred to the Ottoman Empire on 29 August 1868. The ship was commissioned into the Ottoman fleet in March 1870. In 1875, the ship received a single 120 mm gun manufactured by Krupp.

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. At the start of the war, Lüft-ü Celil and her sister ship OTTOMAN IRONCLAD Hifz-ur Rahman to the Danube, to try to prevent Russian forces from crossing the river. On 11 May, while cruising in the Danube off Izmail, the ship was attacked by Russian artillery consisting of 6 in mortars and 25-pounder rifled guns. One of the shells struck the vessel, probably in the boiler room, where it caused a large explosion that destroyed the ship. The river monitor OTTOMAN MONITOR Feth-ül İslam picked up twenty men, but most of her crew, some 160 officers and men, were killed in the explosion.