The Livadia was born of imperial dissatisfaction. In 1860, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, the general admiral of the Russian Imperial Navy, had converted an old paddle steamer called the Tigr into a yacht for the Romanovs, but the 62-meter vessel lacked the space and comforts a royal family expected. There was talk of ordering a replacement in England; instead, the commission went to Captain Leopold Schwede at the Nikolaev (now Mykolaiv) Admiralty. Work began in late 1869. Displacing 1,965 tons, the finished Livadia was smaller than her grander Baltic Sea sister, the Derzhava, yet she matched that ship in the opulence of her imperial suites, which were designed by the celebrated court architect Ippolit Monighetti. She was, in effect, a floating fragment of a palace, fitted out for a dynasty.

Most royal yachts spend their lives in calm ceremony, but the Livadia earned a distinction none of her Russian sisters could claim: she saw active combat. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, fought between the Russian and Ottoman empires across the Black Sea and the Balkans, the Livadia served in the conflict, the only Russian imperial yacht ever to do so. It is an odd image, this gilded vessel with its emperor's staterooms pressed into the hard business of naval war. Whatever grandeur she had been built for, for a season she belonged to the fleet rather than the family, a pleasure craft called up to serve the empire that had made her.

The Livadia's end came suddenly. On the foggy morning of 22 October 1878, with none of the Romanovs aboard, she ran aground near the Tarkhankut Lighthouse at the western edge of the Crimean peninsula. The crew reached shore safely and managed to salvage most of the royal furnishings, carrying the emperor's finery back onto solid land. The ship herself could not be saved; forty-seven days after the grounding, the waves finished her, breaking the hull apart where she lay. The name did not die with her. In 1880 it passed to a new experimental yacht built for the Romanovs in Scotland. But the original Livadia stayed put in the shallows off Cape Tarkhan-Kut, her wooden body dissolving into the seabed until only the copper and the deck timbers remained.

For generations after she sank, the Livadia lay in plain sight and utter anonymity. Divers exploring the shallows off the cape found her often enough, but no one could say what she was; among themselves they called the wreck simply that little steamer, an unremarkable ruin among the rocks. The mystery held until October 2008, when divers from the Russian city of Tula finally examined the site closely and confirmed her identity. By then the wooden hull had disintegrated completely, but the remains of the deck and the copper lining were still recognizable, and their sensors detected still more metal buried in the sand below. A yacht built to carry an emperor across the Black Sea had spent 130 years as a nameless heap of copper and timber, until at last someone came along who could give the little steamer back its name.