MS Mega Smeralda
car ferry launched in 1985
MS Mega Smeralda is a cruiseferry owned by Medinvest and operated by Corsica Ferries - Sardinia Ferries. She was built in 1985 by Wärtsilä at the Helsinki New Shipyard in Helsinki, Finland, for Johnson Line as MS Svea for use in Silja Line traffic. Between 1992 and 1994, she sailed for Silja Line as MS Silja Karneval and, between 1994 and 2008, for Color Line as MS Color Festival.
History
Silja Line service
MS Svea and her sister MS Wellamo were modeled after Silja Line's highly successful Helsinki–Stockholm service ferries MS Finlandia and MS Silvia Regina. Between the two classes, the aesthetic differences are the most notable; whilst the Finlandia and her sister followed a "form follows function" design philosophy resulting in a very boxy design for the ships, the new sisters for the Turku–Stockholm routing followed a more rounded and smoother, and overall much less hostile, design.
In 1989, there were plans to rebuild Svea with rails on the cardeck so that she could also carry railroad carriages on board, but these were shelved. Until 1990, her funnel displayed the colours of Johnson Line, but at that time Silja Line's owners Johnson Line and Effoa merged into one company, EffJohn, and Silja Line's seal logo was moved from the ship's hulls into their funnels.
In 1992, Svea and her sister underwent a large-scale reconstruction at Lloyd Werft in Bremerhaven, Germany, where most of the ships' interiors were rebuilt, a new "skybar" added on deck 9, a new more blue-dominated colour scheme replaced the traditional Silja stripes and the ship was renamed Silja Karneval in accordance with Silja's new name policy. In fact, the funds used to rebuild Svea and Wellamo were originally meant for the rebuilding of the GTS Finnjet, but her planned rebuilding would have been too expensive and EffJohn opted to spend what money they had on Svea and Wellamo instead.
Color Line service
Silja Karneval's service with Silja proved to be short.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “MS Mega Smeralda” is car ferry launched in 1985. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mega, Smeralda and ferry, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q966791. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1985, 1992, 1994 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “MS Mega Smeralda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.