NARRATOR: The Black Sea.
Home to lost tales of ancient mariners that only now
are coming into full view.
DR DAVIS: It's like finding a dinosaur with feathers.
That's how rare it was.
NARRATOR: What can a surprising shipwreck reveal
about the men who ruled these waters for a thousand years?
DR BRENNAN: These ships were feeding and maintaining a whole empire.
DR DAVIS: And it helps turn the empire into one of the greatest ever known.
NARRATOR: How does a glint of precious metal
reveal a battle to decide the fate of two empires?
DR DAL: This event changed naval warfare all around the world.
NARRATOR: And what does a lost U-boat say about Hitler's plans
to build his own empire here?
Three mysteries.
Three expeditions.
One sea of secrets.
DR DAVIS: The Black Sea is filled with mystery.
There's always been warfare, strife and battles taking place
on or near the Black Sea, contesting for that territory.
There are so many connections to be made,
but there's so little evidence to go from.
NARRATOR: Between Europe and Asia six countries crowd
around the shores of the Black Sea
with just one small outlet connecting it to the world's oceans.
The vessels that plied these waters over
a thousand years ago have long been a mystery.
Historians have only a handful of descriptions in ancient text.
Finding an actual shipwreck could change everything.
DR DAVIS: In 2007 I received an invitation to come
and take part in an expedition to the Black Sea.
And this was very exciting.
DR BRENNAN: It's really been kind of unexplored.
And so only a handful of expeditions have really
done surveys looking for shipwrecks in these waters.
The Black Sea's right in my first-year expeditions
and so it's where I started to learn
the process of how we locate ancient shipwrecks.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists have long suspected the Black Sea
could be hiding a treasure trove of wrecks
because of the unusual properties of its water.
DR DAVIS: Well the Black Sea chemistry is unique because
from about 600 ft all the way down to the very bottom of the Black Sea
there is literally no oxygen in the water,
in the so called Anoxic layer.
Everywhere else shipwrecks are not preserved,
mostly because of a very nasty little sea worm. They eat everything.
Meaning ships, rope, all of the stuff that you would find on an ancient wooden ship,
usually gone everywhere else except the Black Sea.
NARRATOR: No-one had ever searched for shipwrecks
in the deepest layers of the Black Sea until 2000.
DR DAVIS: The explorer Robert Ballard set out to explore the bottom of the Black Sea,
like it had never been done before.
DR BRENNAN: Dr. Ballard is the world-renowned
ocean explorer who found Titanic in 1985.
On his very first expedition to the Black Sea no-one was ready for what he would find.
Ballard's expedition found shipwrecks near a town called Sinop.
DR DAVIS: They found three Sinop shipwrecks right off the bat, A, B and C.
They were in an area of the Black Sea that only partially preserved shipwrecks.
And it was only, like all archaeological excavations are,
on the last day at the last minute
that they decided to look in deeper Anoxic waters
and that's when they found Sinop D.
The team on the ship must have been quite confused.
They were looking at multiple vertical timbers sticking out of the mud,
one of them quite large.
And all of a sudden, the realization must have dawned on them
this is an ancient shipwreck.
They saw structural features that had never before been seen intact
on an ancient vessel.
Only in illustrations.
Prior to this shipwreck no other ships had been found
in the Anoxic layer perfectly preserved.
This meant that archaeologists, for the first time,
could look at a shipwreck in its full dimensionality
and now there's nothing we have to guess at.
Sinop D was an unprecedented find.
It's like finding a dinosaur with feathers, that's how rare it was.
But in 2000 all the team could do was look
at what they were seeing on the seabed.
They didn't know the date of the ship.
It could have been an ancient Greek ship.
It could have been Roman.
It could have built 200 years ago.
They just didn't know.
There was an obsession to go back.
DR BRENNAN: How old was the ship?
Where was it sailing to? Where was it coming from?
A lot of these things were still a mystery.
NARRATOR: When Dan and Mike join the 2007 expedition,
they hope that new technology will bring new answers.
DR BRENNAN: The 2007 expedition was specifically
designed for us to spend a week really
investigating this wreck in depth.
In these waters that we're exploring it's way too deep for scuba divers,
so we need to use remotely operated vehicles to get down to those depths and get good,
high quality video of these sites.
DR DAVIS: We had a workhorse, state of the art,
remotely operated vehicle named Hercules
that could help us explore the wreck in multiple ways
and take high definition video of the entire operation.
So, I remember this view approaching Sinop D
for the first time in 2007 and just being blown away.
DR BRENNAN: And here you have it,
the well-preserved wooden shipwreck, the mast still standing.
DR DAVIS: But the only one we have. They're very rare.
DR BRENNAN: And you've got a piece of rope still wrapped around the top
which is unheard of.
DR DAVIS: I saw the mast for the first time and it was a magic moment for me.
It was emotional.
NARRATOR: Hercules allows the team to measure
every inch of what's left on the sea floor.
Before they can figure out the ship's purpose,
they'll need to analyses the wreck's size, shape and design.
DR DAVIS: What we find is a 45-long ship.
A single mast that probably carried a square sail.
There's no evidence of decking in the middle of the wreck,
so we can assume it's a cargo hold.
And lucky for us there's cargo still on board.
Typically, when we stumble upon an ancient shipwreck the first clue,
we look for is the cargo.
Usually these clay jars called amphoras.
Amphoras carried everything.
They carried olive oil, they carried fish sauce, they carried wine.
DR BRENNAN: These diagnostic amphoras that can help us
put a date on the wreck and tell how old it is.
DR DAVIS: Recovering an artefact from a shipwreck is not a simple process.
They use a little sucker that the ROV put on the amphora
to pick it up without damaging it.
So, they would move it over to a net.
Once we have artefacts in these nets, we get it on board as carefully as possible.
Watching the ROV pilots handle these artefacts
and put them carefully into these baskets
and then send them up to the surface is really nerve-racking
because we don't want them damaged.
NARRATOR: The hope is that a close study of the clay
jars will establish the age of the shipwreck.
DR MARANZANA: An amphora holds a lot of information about the ancient world.
Amphoras can be dated quite precisely because
they're everywhere and they are very well studied.
So, the amphoras can be dated through their physical characteristics.
Normally the handles and the neck,
but also what we call the foot, which is the bottom part.
People can compare the new find with the already studied one
and establish a quite precise date.
So, for Sinop they are fairly small.
They are mostly carrot shape and some of them have grooves
that go around the entire body of the amphora.
And so those are quite distinctive characteristics
that a give a clear idea of the date
when Sinop D was sailing on the Black Sea.
DR BRENNAN: The amphora that we documented were dated to the 5th and 6th centuries AD.
We had never before had a shipwreck that is 1500 years old in its entirety,
preserved on the seabed.
NARRATOR: The dates mean Sinop D is sailing at the tail end of the Roman Empire.
What can it reveal about a new power that's rising to take its place?
DR DAVIS: Now that we knew what the date of the ship was
it was exciting because Sinop D dates
to this pivotal moment in world history.
NARRATOR: By the 5th Century the once mighty Roman Empire is crumbling,
except in the east which breaks away to create the Byzantine Empire.
It's capital no longer Rome but the great city of Constantinople,
modern day Istanbul.
DR MARANZANA: The choice of Constantinople as the capital is mostly
because of its strategic position.
It was located in-between the two continents, Asia and Europe.
It was by the sea so it could easily transport goods and troops.
And so, Constantinople at the time of the Byzantine Empire
became the largest city in the world and the most wealthy.
NARRATOR: Constantinople's wealth depends on Black Sea ports like Sinop.
And Sinop D may have played a pivotal role in Byzantine history.
DR DAVIS: Now we had some fundamental questions that we needed answers for.
Among them how does this ship connect to the history of the Byzantine Empire itself?
How did it contribute to the growth of the empire?
NARRATOR: One way to answer those questions is to investigate the ship itself.
DR DAVIS: The wreck was so enticing,
but the ship is so deeply buried in sediment it was giving up its mysteries
with such great difficulty.
We knew that we would have to start excavating the shipwreck.
With Hercules now we had the capability of removing silt in large volumes.
And exposing more of its timbers.
Oh yes! All the mud. Look at this Black Sea mud.
DR BRENNAN: Yeah. It's really sticky and almost like Jell-O the way it moves.
DR DAVIS: I remember just thinking, "What a strange seabed."
Never seen anything like that before.
Removing the silt was a painstaking process.
The upper layers very easy to remove,
but as we dug deeper into the mud the more thick the mud became
and at that point our work slowed way down.
We managed to explore a little bit of some of the planking
but we were not able to dig as deep as we wanted to unfortunately.
We did not find anything that would give away how the ship was constructed.
It was a disappointment.
NARRATOR: The Black Sea's stubborn mud dashes the expedition's hopes.
The secrets of Sinop D remain unknown.
Then comes news of a stunning archaeological find.
One that reignites the stalled investigation into Sinop D.
DR BRENNAN: Since the discovery of Sinop D in 2000,
what have we learned about ship building?
DR DAVIS: We've been really fortunate to find this graveyard
of shipwrecks in modern day Istanbul, ancient Constantinople.
The old harbour that served the city was buried in silt
over the centuries and as they were clearing it out
to build a subway, they found 37 ancient shipwrecks.
Lucky for us the discoveries in this harbour
called Yenikapi all date to the Byzantine period.
And what you see at Yenikapi is an evolution of Black Sea shipbuilding techniques.
Sinop D is right there in the 5th and 6th Century
which is about the midpoint between those 37 wrecks that were found.
Yenikapi provides all the evidence for the lower part of the ships
because their upper works were not preserved.
Sinop D provides almost a perfectly preserved example of the top to the middle.
DR BRENNAN: Yeah. DR DAVIS: So now we can bring those two together
and get a full comprehensive picture for the first time.
There was this earlier tradition in which shipwrights
lock planks together edge to edge and then
they peg them together so that they can't slide and they can't come apart.
And then inserted the skeleton to help stiffen the hull.
And then there's this later tradition, it switched completely.
It's where you build the frames or the ribs of the ship first.
And then you plank it all around it to create the shell.
Edge joinery is still being used, but it's not on the elaborate scale
that we had in the earlier tradition.
So, the result is cheaper, faster ship construction.
Fewer people needed in the shipyard.
Fewer trained people. Fewer skilled people.
DR BRENNAN: And probably less wood too.
DR DAVIS: Less wood. Cheaper. Faster. DR BRENNAN: Yeah.
DR DAVIS: Because of the dates suggested by those amphoras
we now know that Sinop D fits
within this transition between those two ship construction techniques.
So now we could piece together all this evidence
to finally see what's under the mud
and tell the full story of Sinop D's life.
Sinop D is a cargo vessel.
A merchant ships.
Filled with amphoras.
It was likely trading between the very prosperous port city of Sinop
and the capital city itself, Constantinople.
It might have even been heading to the same harbour
where that earlier graveyard of shipwrecks was found at Yenikapi.
NARRATOR: The ability to construct ships faster
and cheaper is a game changer for the Byzantine Empire.
And the secret can be seen in the Sinop D wreck.
DR DAVIS: With this cheaper way of building ships,
a middle class emerges who's able to buy the ship,
captain the ship, act as the merchant
and actually create their own wealth.
So, in this sense the Sinop D shipwreck is a wealth creator.
It's a type of economic engine for the middle class.
DR BRENNAN: I don't think it's a coincidence that a new type of shipbuilding
starts to arise at the same time that the Byzantine Empire begins to flourish.
These trading ships, like Sinop D, were feeding and maintaining a whole empire.
And this is the beginning of a long period of lucrative trading.
DR DAVIS: This was one of many ships that helped
generate the extreme wealth of the empire.
And it helped turn the empire into one of the greatest ever known.
NARRATOR: Sinop continues to be a key port along the Black Sea
long after the fall of the Byzantines.
And its waters conceal other secrets.
RASIM: I have lived in Sinop all my life.
And being underwater is my passion.
The Black Sea is as its name suggests a black, dark sea.
In other seas you see a dark shade of blue
but this blackness of the Black Sea is one worth seeing.
The darkness really fascinates me.
NARRATOR: Yasar Tarakci has been finding relics in
Sinop harbour ever since he started diving as a boy.
He's found ancient Roman and Byzantine artefacts and even old canons.
But one discovery proves to be the find of a lifetime.
RASIM: In the early 1980s, because I was a professional diver,
I was called by a local fisherman to rescue some snagged nets.
During the dive I couldn't see anything because of the mud.
But using our hands we realized the nets were covering an old ship.
NARRATOR: The curious wreck consumes Yasar for 40 years.
What is this ship and how did it end up on the sea floor?
RASIM: I dived the wreck several times and could see it was made of wood.
I knew I wasn't looking at a modern ship.
It was well preserved and in shallow water.
That meant it couldn't be ancient.
That left open the possibility that this wreck
could be something from the time of the Ottoman Empire.
NARRATOR: During the 1300s the Ottomans
wrest control of the Black Sea from the Byzantines
and here they build an empire that lasts for six centuries,
creating one of the largest and most feared navies in the world.
However, there's almost no archaeological evidence of it.
DR DAL: There should be many shipwrecks in Yenikapi
but we don't have an Ottoman's war ship.
We know so many things about the ship
building activities and traditions and complex
in Ottoman Empire, but we don't have an evidence to show people that, yes,
we got the correct information or no, the information was not correct.
That's why shipwrecks are so important for very Ottoman naval historian.
NARRATOR: One reason the empire's warships are missing today
has to do with an Ottoman tradition of dismantling and recycling old vessels.
Yasar's find is a big surprise.
He believes it's Ottoman, but is it?
NARRATOR: Dilara comes to Sinop to meet Yasar.
And to investigate the shipwreck he's spent decades deciphering.
RASIM: Here you can see the frames of the ship.
They are made from oak.
The beam is still stable in its original position.
And you can see copper on the hull.
Because the hull is surrounded by copper
and rot proof oak it remained intact over time.
DR DAL: He said that the ship is covered by copper
which is really, really important for me. Why?
Because this confirms the wreck is from the time of the Ottoman Empire.
NARRATOR: Ottoman warships relied on copper sheathing,
an innovation to protect wooden hulls,
until the middle of the 19th century.
DR DAL: And now we have a pivotal evidence.
It really gives a lot of richness to Ottoman naval history.
NARRATOR: It's now clear that this is a rare Ottoman warship.
So now Yasar wants to work out its name.
Given its location he thinks it may be a leftover from one
of the most famous battles ever to take place in the Black Sea.
RASIM: I learned about the Battle of Sinop
from the oldest diver in Sinop when I was about 15 or 16.
He told me about a shocking attack on Ottoman ships anchored in the harbour here.
It killed nearly 3,000 people.
NARRATOR: The Ottoman's face a rival power, the Russian Empire.
And on November 30th, 1853, in a bid for Black Sea supremacy
the Russian navy smashes an Ottoman fleet here in Sinop.
The date tallies with the age of Yasar's find.
RASIM: To figure out the identity of the wreck
I turned to historical sources created at the time of the battle.
These sources included pictures and a very important chart made by the Russians.
This Russian chart details the location of each ship they destroyed.
NARRATOR: Russian sources suggest the attack on Sinop harbour
destroys 15 Ottoman vessels.
RASIM: On the Russian battle chart,
I found one record that explained the location of the wreck I found.
This is evidence it was a victim of the battle.
What's unexpected is that the wreck is outside
the harbour and not in line with most of the
other ships that went down that day.
NARRATOR: Yasar examines a memoir written by a survivor of the attack.
It helps explain the information on the Russian battle chart.
Russian guns had crippled a vessel named
the Nesim-I-Zafer leaving it afloat but helpless.
The story of Yasar's find now comes into focus.
Because the Nesim-i-Zafer sank outside the harbour
the Ottomans never tried to salvage it,
and the wreck remains untouched for more that 130 years.
RASIM: We found the Nesim-i-Zafer
thanks to fishermen's nets that landed on it.
We couldn't have found it otherwise since it was 120 ft underwater.
NARRATOR: The Black Sea keeps a tight grip on its secrets.
But 300 miles west of Sinop a 14-year-long quest casts
light on a secret Nazi plan for world domination.
SELCUK: People come to me to ask for my help to find shipwrecks or identify them.
I love the challenge of finding a wreck that's been lost to time,
revealing something new about our history.
One of my most challenging missions was back in 2006.
I was asked to help find a World War II German submarine, the U-23.
Incredibly the person who contacted me was the Commander himself,
Rudolph Arendt, who was 83 years old.
I found this very interesting.
One of the most fascinating stories of the submarine warfare.
I was lucky that I had the first-hand account
of the whole story of U-23 from the horse's mouth.
I was determined to find his U-boat and discover exactly what happened to it.
NARRATOR: Rudolph Arendt takes Selcuk to the U-23's last known location.
He remembers that the sub sank off the Black Sea coast of Agva,
60 miles east of Istanbul.
Rudolph came to the Black Sea as part of Hitler's desperate war with the Soviet Union.
By 1944 Germany is losing to the allies.
To stop U-boats from falling into enemy hands
Hitler's admirals issue a dramatic order,
telling Commanders like Rudolph to sink their own vessels.
At the time he is only 21.
Rudolph's memories provide Selcuk with crucial evidence.
SELCUK: When Rudolph Arendt got the order to scuttle his boat,
he found a suitable bay and left 25 of his people there.
He had told me that after dropping his crew he took out the submarine north,
placed explosives then got onto a small inflatable raft and rowed back to his people.
NARRATOR: The problem is Rudolph doesn't remember
exactly where he scuttled his U-boat.
But he does have one invaluable memento.
SELCUK: I was lucky that Rudolph Arendt had made a very nice
sketch of the bay seen from his
submarine when he was dropping his crew.
We went from bay to bay and eventually found one matching the sketch.
If this was the landing point then we now needed
to head north in the same direction Rudolph sailed
the U-23 before scuttling it.
NARRATOR: Selçuk looks for the submarine with a side-scan
sonar capable of mapping large areas of the seabed.
SELCUK: We searched all this area north of this bay.
But we couldn't find anything. We couldn't find a wreck.
NARRATOR: The 2006 survey ends with the final resting place
of Rudolph's U-boat still a mystery.
SELCUK: But I assured him that I would be carrying
on with the search after he went back home.
After 2006 I was there several times, but I never found anything.
Years later I applied to the navy to look for it
with their much more sophisticated sonars
and in 2019 they called me to say that they had found something
with their multi-beam sonar in that area
where they have been looking for the U-23
is a huge break in the now nearly 14-year-long hunt for U-23.
And ROV descends into the Black Sea for a closer look.
Could this finally be Rudolph's missing U-boat?
SELCUK: The wreck has a list of 90, so it's practically lying on her starboard side.
The two periscopes.
And then three torpedo tubes at the bow.
This is a very distinctive shape.
Definitely a submarine and no other submarine in history was ever lost in that area.
There's no doubt, through the dimensions this is the U-23.
NARRATOR: Selçuk concludes the wreck is a class of U-boat called a Type 2B.
A smaller model than typical Nazi U-boats,
they offered a solution to a major obstacle of the Black Sea attack plan.
REPORTER: Throughout World War II Turkey, protecting her neutrality,
cut off all passage of warships to and from the Black Sea.
NARRATOR: Because they can't sail in Hitler orders that six of the smaller type U-boats
be dismantled and transported overland from Germany 2,000 miles
via road and river to the Black Sea.
None of the six U-boats, however, will ever make it back home.
Questions now turn to what state the U-23 is in 75 years after it went down.
Selcuk shares the news with Rudolph, who's now 96 years old.
Despite setting three charges Rudolph only recalls seeing one explosion.
Selcuk plans to dive the length of the wreck,
looking for clues to confirm which of the three
explosive charges sank the submarine.
SELCUK: We will swim all along the submarine
and then I would like to find where Rudolph
Arendt told me he had put the explosives.
NARRATOR: There's no outward sign of damage on the front of the sub,
or near the periscope.
As Selcuk moves toward the stern.
SELCUK: There's an opening of about 2 ft x 2 ft with the skin sheets burned out.
This confirms to me that this is the only explosion
out of the three that succeeded in sinking the U-23.
Having researched this ship for more than 14 years
it meant a lot to me when I saw the wreck and that it was the U-23.
It was an emotional moment for me.
Of course, this all will mean a lot more to Rudolph than it means to all of us.
NARRATOR: The Black Sea has only just begun to give up its secrets.
many more lay hidden on its inky waters waiting to be discovered.
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