Kizilburun Column Wreck

Navis Columnaria Kizilburunensis

ShipwreckAsia · Off Kizilburun, near Selcuk, TurkeyBuilt 70 BCE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

A Roman stone-carrier sank off Turkey's Aegean coast around 70 BCE, its hold weighed down by a single 60-ton marble column: eight drums and a Doric capital quarried on Proconnesus in the Sea of Marmara. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology spent six seasons, 2005 to 2011, lifting the drums from 45 meters of water without disturbing the waterlogged hull beneath. The column had been bound for the Temple of Apollo at Claros, just 50 kilometers short of delivery.

What happened here

A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.