The world's oldest "shipwreck", dating back more than 2,400 years, was discovered at the bottom of the Black Sea.

BERLIN – Over the last 600 years, the Black Sea in Europe has been one of the maritime areas hardest hit by war and nationalism. On the borders of Turkey, Russia and Ukraine, among other nations, the internal water body was effectively cut off from international trade after the occupation of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It was a field of key battle during the Second World War and was again challenged, with Ukraine and Russia clashed in recent years.

But there was a time when trade flourished in the Black Sea. On Tuesday, European researchers revealed staggering details over a period in which Greek ships crossed the Bosphorus Strait, loaded with merchandise for trade and threatened with storms and natural disasters.

One of these ships has now been discovered almost completely intact at the bottom of the Black Sea, at a depth of 2 km, where oxygen levels are so low that marine life is virtually nonexistent. While animals and bacteria would usually decompose the remains of a wooden shipwreck in a few centuries, the 30-meter-long Greek shipwreck remained intact for more than 2400 years, researchers at the Maritime Archeology Project said on Tuesday. the black Sea.

"The Black Sea is considered one of the best underwater laboratories in the world," the team wrote on its website.

The Greek merchant ship was the oldest of the dozens of shipwrecks discovered off the Bulgarian coast during this three-year project, which according to the team is the biggest effort of its kind. The results are documented in a two-hour documentary project, which should also be released on Tuesday.

Using scuba diving robots and sonar ships, the researchers swept the bottom of the Black Sea, mainly looking for ruins of former submerged colonies to study the effects of melting glaciers on sea level. But while they were mapping more than 770 square miles of seabed, more than five dozen historic ships – almost all of which surprisingly well preserved – appeared before the cameras of their remotely operated submarine vehicles. The team believes that some of the ships were once operated by the Romans, while others date back to the 17th century.

"More than 60 wrecks of ships belonging to a fleet of Cossack raids of the seventeenth century, from Roman merchant ships equipped with amphorae to a full ship of the classical period, were discovered during the three-year period" said the team in a statement.

The researchers were particularly interested in the ancient Greek ship, only a small part of which was removed from the original site to confirm the age of the wood radiocarbon. It is not planned to recover the entire wooden structure, partly for fear of seeing it break. The researchers also did not disclose its exact location.

But the discovery could still provide remarkable information about an era from which few remnants of wood are still intact.

"This will change our understanding of shipbuilding and sea shipping in the ancient world," said Jon Adams, a member of the research project team.