The shape of the original ship was silhouetted on the seafloor by rows of amphorae buried to their necks beneath sand. The divers emerged from the water ecstatic. They'd found the wreck and marked its position. After 25 long minutes an inflatable red buoy finally popped above the surface of the waves. Even experts risk equipment failures, insufficient decompression, and the dangerous confusion induced by nitrogen narcosis.
The moments while divers are submerged are always tense. We waited on the surface, the waves pushing us away from the drop point. This morning they were searching a site at a depth of more than 197 feet (60 meters).
His leads had already helped the team discover many shipwrecks.
#FARSKY SHIPWRECKS FREE#
One of the divers was Manos Mitikas, the local Fourni free diver who called Koutsouflakis a year ago with the map of wrecks. But Campbell and Koutsouflakis depend on a decidedly low-tech method of detection: conversation with fishermen who have spent decades in these waters.Īs we hovered above the suspected site the first two divers strapped on roughly 50 pounds of gear and tumbled backward over opposite sides of the boat, leaving only a froth of surface bubbles as they descended. Other shipwreck survey projects use remote-sensing tools to identify aberrations on the seafloor, sometimes spending tens of thousands of dollars for each day of survey.
#FARSKY SHIPWRECKS DRIVER#
The abundance of natural bays and harbors made Fourni an appealing shelter for ancient ships seeking refuge from strong winds on the open waters.Īfter hydroplaning across a distance of mist and spray, our driver slowed the RIB and we called the sponge diver to confirm the location. We were pursuing a tip from a sponge diver about an unusually deep wreck in one of the many small bays formed by the curvy coastline of the main island.
#FARSKY SHIPWRECKS PROFESSIONAL#
On one of the last mornings of diving this June, I set out with four of the best professional divers in Greece in a small RIB, short for rigid inflatable boat. The amphorae recovered in 2016 originated in Cyprus, Egypt, Samos, Patmos, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Rome, Spain, and even North Africa, revealing the vast web of trade and commerce that crisscrossed the many cultures of the Mediterranean throughout history. It's possible to identify the place of origin for different amphorae by analyzing the style of the jars and the elements in the clay: different pottery workshops made visually distinct vessels by firing clay sourced from local soils. These were used by merchant ships throughout antiquity to transport cargoes of wine, olive oil, fish sauce, and other goods. The most common artifacts that survive are clay storage jars known as amphorae. The other wrecks range across the centuries, with cargoes from the Classical period (480-323 B.C.), the Hellenistic period (323-31 B.C.), the Late Roman period (300-600 A.D.), and the Medieval period (500-1500 A.D.) Cooking pots, plates, bowls, storage jars, a palm-size lamp, and black-painted ceramic fine-ware are among the artifacts recovered from the wrecks so far.
The earliest shipwreck dates to roughly 525 B.C., while the most recent is from the early 1800s. The sunken ships discovered in June 2016 span more than 2,000 years of Greek maritime history. Over 22 days of diving they found an additional 23 pre-modern shipwrecks, raising the total number identified at Fourni so far to 45, an astonishing 20 percent of all known shipwrecks in Greek waters. This June they returned to the Fourni archipelago with a team of 25 divers, archaeologists, and artifact conservators. In just 11 days of diving in September 2015, Koutsouflakis and his co-director Peter Campbell of RPM Nautical discovered 22 shipwrecks. While Koutsouflakis listened to the spear-fisher describe everything he'd seen, he flashed his colleague a grin. The timing of the call was perfect: as a native Ikarian, Koutsouflakis had heard rumors of shipwrecks at Fourni for years, and that summer he'd been trying to organize an expedition to locate them. He wanted to show Koutsouflakis the sites. Over the past year he'd made a hand-drawn map and marked the locations of nearly 40 possible shipwrecks. During years of diving and fishing in the coastal waters around Fourni, the man had spotted dozens of areas where the seafloor was strewn with ancient clay vessels-the coral-encrusted cargoes from ships lost at sea long ago. The caller was a free diver and spear-fisher from the remote Fourni archipelago, a small cluster of islands between Samos and Ikaria in the eastern Aegean.
One July afternoon in 2015, the maritime archaeologist George Koutsouflakis was talking with a colleague in his Athens office when his phone rang.
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