Cape Urdoviza Shipwreck

The Urdoviza shipwreck lies in 8.5 m of water in the Western Black Sea, c. 150 km northwest of Istanbul, and c. 60 km south of the Bulgarian regional center Burgas. The wreck is located in the southern lee of the eponymous cape, just a few hundred feet away from the Kitten shipwreck, excavated by INA and the Bulgarian Centre for Underwater Archaeology (CUA) from 2000 to 2003. The archaeological site retains the marvellously preserved wreck of an Ottoman wooden sailing merchantman buried in anoxic seabed sediments.

The Urdoviza shipwreck has been known to local divers since the early 1980s. The archaeological investigation commenced in 2022 as another joint project under a Memorandum of Understanding between the CUA and INA, with funding by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture, CUA and INA. The interdisciplinary project team consists of academics and students from Bulgaria, USA and Australia. The work platform is the research vessel of the CUA, MV Hristina.

An estimated 90% of the Urdoviza ship is preserved in the archaeological record as coherent timber structure, buried down to 4.5 m deep in the seabed sediments up to the main deck. The vessel is lying on a close to even keel. The hull is 23.79 m long and 7.28 m broad at the widest part. Preliminary results from dendrochronological dating broadly align with artifact chronologies and point to a tentative date in the first half of the 19th century, with tentative dendrochronological terminus post quem for felling the hull’s oaken timbers in 1829.

Excavations are currently focusing on Urdoviza’s stern and central hold area. The complex structure of the ship’s oaken hull is being uncovered and a cargo of squared oaken beams has been identified, possibly construction timber destined for the Ottoman imperial capital of Constantinople. Excavations in the stern revealed a rich and diverse artifactual repertoire with material evidence for navigation practice, day-to-day life, material culture and diet. Apart from typically Ottoman inventories of smoking paraphernalia and domestic crockery, there are various imported items with origins ranging from the British Isles, Northwest Europe and the Adriatic, to Far East Asia, reflecting the re-integration of Black Sea maritime communities in the globalized maritime world of the “Long 19th Century.”