The final vessel of the Hydra class, she was ordered in 1885 in response to a crisis in the Balkans and Ottoman naval expansion.

[3] Psara was ordered from the Société Nouvelle des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée shipyard in Le Havre, France, during the premiership of Charilaos Trikoupis.

The ship, named for the island of Psara, was launched in 1890, and by 1892, she and her sister-ships Spetsai and Hydra were delivered to the Greek fleet.

The Ottoman Navy had remained in port during the conflict, but a major naval intervention of the Great Powers prevented the Greeks from capitalizing on their superiority.

The international intervention in Crete concluded with the creation of an autonomous Cretan State under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire in December 1898.

[9] Two months later, the Ottoman fleet attacked the Greek navy, in an attempt to disrupt the naval blockade surrounding the Dardanelles.

[10] The Ottoman fleet, which included Turgut Reis, Barbaros Hayreddin, the outdated ironclad battleships Mesudiye and Âsâr-ı Tevfik, nine destroyers, and six torpedo boats, sortied from the Dardanelles at 9:30.

The Greek flotilla, which included the armored cruiser Georgios Averof and Psara and her sisters, had been sailing from the island of Imbros to the patrol line outside the straits.

[10] The Naval Battle of Lemnos resulted from an Ottoman plan to lure the faster Georgios Averof away from the Dardanelles.

Psara was much slower than the Turkish cruiser, and had no real chance of catching her, and Hamidiye remained at large until the end of the war in May 1913.

[13] At the outbreak of World War I at the end of July 1914, Greece's pro-German monarch, Constantine I, decided to remain neutral.