2,500-Year-Old Sunken Ancient Greek Ship Used to Sail to Crimea Discovered in Ukraine’s Black Sea Waters
The ruins of the Ancient Greek port of Olbia Pontica in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region. The 2,500-year-old sunken Ancient Greek ship has been discovered off the coast. Photo: Wikipedia
An approximately 2,500-year-old sunken Ancient Greek ship, likely the oldest known in the Northern Black Sea, and used by the Ancient Greeks to sail to the Crimean Peninsula, has been discovered by underwater archaeologists in the Black Sea near Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region.
The sunken Ancient Greek ship has been found during a joint expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences Poland’s Warsaw Institute of Archaeology, Hromadske Radio reports.
The sunken 2,500-year-old vessel is believed to be the oldest one of its kind to have been found in Ukraine’s Black Sea waters.
The ship may have been used by the Ancient Greeks to sail along the ancient Black Sea trade routes to Olbia Pontica, an Ancient Greek port in today’s Ukraine, Mykolaiv region, and Chersonesus (Chersonesos, Chersonese), and Ancient Greek colony near today’s Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula.
“This Ancient Greek ship is one of the oldest known in the Northern Black Sea,” Vyacheslav Gerasimov, head of the international underwater archaeological expedition which has found the Antiquity Era vessel, is quoted as saying.
“The ship belonged to the Ancient Greek mariners in the 5th century BC, the period of colonization of the Northern Black Sea when the first settlement of Olbia was established,” he elaborates.
The underwater archaeologists are presently exploring the vessel on the bottom of the Black Sea.
A decision on whether the sunken Ancient Greek ship could potentially be extracted will be made after the research is completed. However, that remains an unlikely prospect.
“Lift without certain conditions for preservation and storage is impossible; the wood that laid for more than 2,000 years under water may fall to pieces,” Gerasimov explains with respect to the extraction possibilities.
For the time being, no photos have been released of the sunken 2,500-year-old Ancient Greek ship discovered in Ukraine’s Black Sea section off the coast of the Mykolaiv region.
The Ancient Greek colonies in the Northern Black Sea in the 8th – 3rd century BC. Map: Wikipedia
Another recent sunken ancient ship find from the Northern Black Sea has been a well-preserved sunken Roman ship from the 2nd-3rd century AD discovered by a Russian underwater archaeology expedition in the Black Sea, off the coast of Balaklava on the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia’s military forces seized Crimea from Ukraine in early 2014 and shortly afterwards annexed the Black Sea peninsula.
The Russian annexation has been rejected by the international community, and has led the West to impose sanctions on Moscow. However, Russia has established de facto control over a large zone in the Black Sea that comprised Ukraine’s territorial waters surrounding Crimea, and has sent a number of research expeditions there.
Back in 2015, one such expedition discovered a sunken sizable Byzantine ship carrying a large number of amphorae.
A 2,000-year-old sunken Ancient Roman ship was recently discovered on the bottom of the Black Sea in Bulgaria’s territorial waters by the international Black Sea M.A.P. expedition, alongside several dozen other ancient, medieval, and Modern Era shipwrecks.
In addition to the numerous well-preserved sunken ships, another intriguing underwater archaeology story recently connected with the Black Sea has been the hypothesis that a large sunken island existed in its southwestern part, near today’s coast of Bulgaria and Turkey.
Also check out these underwater archaeology stories about the findings of the Black Sea M.A.P. expedition in Bulgaria’s territorial waters in the Black Sea:
Also check out these stories about sunken or submerged cities along Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast and beyond:
Maritime Archaeologists Find Bronze Age Settlement under Black Sea’s Seabed off Bulgaria’s Coast
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