NARRATOR: The Black Sea.
Home to lost tales of ancient mariners that only now
are coming into full view.
DAN (off-screen): 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 1,000 years?
MIKE: These ships were feeding and maintaining
a whole empire.
DAN: And it help 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?
DILARA: 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.
(theme music plays)
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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 1,000 years ago
have long been a mystery.
Historians have only a handful of descriptions
in ancient text.
Finding an actual shipwreck could change everything.
DAN (off-screen): In 2007 I received an invitation to come and take
part in an expedition to the Black Sea.
And this was very exciting.
MIKE (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): Well the Black Sea chemistry is unique because
from about 600 feet 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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, 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.
DAN: The explorer Robert Ballard set out to explore the
bottom of the Black Sea, like it had never been done before.
MIKE (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): There was an obsession to go back.
MIKE: How old was the ship? Where was it sailing to?
Where was it coming from?
MIKE (off-screen): 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.
MIKE (off-screen): 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.
DAN: 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.
MIKE: And here you have it,
the well preserved wooden shipwreck, the mast still standing.
DAN (off-screen): Yeah. But the only one we have.
They're very rare.
MIKE (off-screen): And you've got a piece of rope still wrapped around
the top which is unheard of.
DAN (off-screen): 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
analyze the wreck's size, shape and design.
DAN (off-screen): What we find is a 45 feet 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.
DAN (off-screen): Usually these clay jars called amphoras.
Amphoras carried everything.
They carried olive oil, they carried fish sauce,
they carried wine.
MIKE (off-screen): These diagnostic amphoras that can help us put
a date on the wreck and tell how old it is.
Recovering an artifact from a shipwreck is not a
simple process.
MIKE (off-screen): 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 artifacts in these nets we get it on board
as carefully as possible.
Watching the ROV pilots handle these, these artifacts 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.
♪ ♪
PAOLO (off-screen): 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.
PAOLO (off-screen): So the amphoras can be dated through their
physical characteristics.
Normally the, 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, with the already
studied one and establish a quite precise date.
PAOLO (off-screen): 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.
MIKE (off-screen): 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?
♪ ♪
DAN: 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.
PAOLO (off-screen): 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, it could easily
transport goods and, and troops.
PAOLO (off-screen): 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.
DAN: 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?
DAN (off-screen): How did it contribute to the growth of the empire?
NARRATOR: One way to answer those questions is to
investigate the ship itself.
DAN (off-screen): The wreck was so enticing,
but the ship is so deeply buried in sediment it was
giving up its mysteries with such great difficulty.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
MIKE: Yeah.
It's really sticky and, and almost like Jell-O the way it moves.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
MIKE: Since the discovery of Sinop D in 2000,
what have we learned about ship building?
DAN: We've been really fortunate to find this
graveyard of shipwrecks in modern day Istanbul,
ancient Constantinople.
DAN (off-screen): The old harbor 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 harbor 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
MIKE: Yeah.
DAN: So now we can bring those two together and get a full
comprehensive picture for the first time.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): So the result is cheaper, faster ship construction.
Fewer people needed in the shipyard.
Fewer trained people.
Fewer skilled people.
MIKE: And probably less wood too.
DAN: Less wood. Cheaper. Faster.
MIKE: Yeah.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
♪ ♪
DAN (off-screen): Sinop D is a cargo vessel.
A merchant ship.
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 harbor
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.
DAN (off-screen): 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.
MIKE (off-screen): 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.
DAN (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): 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.
RASIM (off-screen): 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 harbor
ever since he started diving as a boy.
He's found ancient Roman and Byzantine artifacts
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.
RASIM (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): 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.
DILARA (off-screen): 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 every
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.
(speaking native language)
NARRATOR: And to investigate the shipwreck he's spent
decades deciphering.
♪ ♪
DILARA: You dived here and found a shipwreck?
RASIM: Yes, we are more of less situated above it.
DILARA: Can I see the footage you took during your dives?
♪ ♪
RASIM (off-screen): 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.
DILARA (off-screen): 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.
DILARA (off-screen): 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.
RASIM (off-screen): He told me about a shocking attack on Ottoman ships
anchored in the harbor 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 (off-screen): 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.
♪ ♪
RASIM: The Ottoman ships were there.
DILARA: Forming a half moon?
RASIM: Yes, a battle formation of a half moon.
NARRATOR: Russian sources suggest the attack on Sinop harbor
destroys 15 Ottoman vessels.
DILARA: So the Ottoman fleet were left defenseless.
RASIM: Outsiders referred to this area
as hell at the time.
RASIM (off-screen): 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 harbor
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.
RASIM: The Russians hauled out the ship
as a trophy of their victory.
But about 6 to 7 miles from Sinop,
with the decks collapsing and hull full of holes
the ship was taking on too much water.
At that point they gave up their trophy ship, the Nesim-i-Zafer,
allowing it to finally sink.
Instead they took 100 members of her crew prisoner
and they just left the ship behind.
NARRATOR: The story of Yasar's find now comes into focus.
Because the Nesim-i-Zafer sank outside the harbor
the Ottomans never tried to salvage it,
and the wreck remains untouched for more
than 130 years.
RASIM: We found the Nesim-i-Zafer thanks to
fishermen's nets that landed on it.
RASIM (off-screen): We couldn't have found it otherwise since it was
120 feet 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 (off-screen): 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.
(speaking native language)
SELCUK (off-screen): I was asked to help find a World War II German submarine,
the U-23.
(speaking native language)
Incredibly the person who contacted me was the Commander himself,
Rudolph Arendt, who was 83 years old.
(speaking native language)
SELCUK: I found this very interesting.
One of the most fascinating stories of the
submarine warfare.
I was lucky that I had the firsthand account of the whole
story of U-23 from the horse's mouth.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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.
RUDOLPH: In the winter of 1941, the German Army suffered enormous losses in Russia.
Then the attack had to be stopped and was to be continued in 1942...
and that's why Hitler's orders were
that submarines had to be sent to the Black Sea
to keep the Russian fleet in their ports
and thank God that worked.
But of course the whole thing was far too late in the course of the war.
NARRATOR: 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: That was an awful moment for a commander having to sink his boat.
Whether you wanted to or not,
you had developed a very close relationship with your boat.
The submarine was actually life insurance for us.
As long as the boat worked... we lived.
(speaking native language)
NARRATOR: Rudolph's memories provide Selcuk with
crucial evidence.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): 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.
RUDOLPH: I made this sketch to illustrate the spot where the crew went ashore.
I came up with the idea
just to draw a sketch of what I saw on that dark night
and that can possibly be used as a clue today.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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: Selcuk looks for the submarine with a side-scan
sonar capable of mapping large areas of the seabed.
SELCUK: We, we, we searched all this area north of this bay.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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 I have been
looking for the U-23.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: The anomaly found by the Turkish navy's survey is a
huge break in the now nearly 14-year-long hunt for U-23.
(speaking native language)
NARRATOR: And ROV descends into the Black Sea for a closer look.
(speaking native language)
NARRATOR: Could this finally be Rudolph's missing U-boat?
♪ ♪
SELCUK (off-screen): The wreck has a list of 90 degrees,
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: Selcuk 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.
MAN (over TV): 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.
(explosion)
Questions now turn to what state the U-23 is in 75 years
after it went down.
SELCUK: Good day, Mr. Arendt.
RUDOLPH: After 14 years we meet again.
NARRATOR: Selcuk shares the news with Rudolph,
who's now 96 years old.
RUDOLPH: Now you have found the boat.
SELCUK: Yes, and the day after tomorrow
I am personally diving to the boat
to closely examine the places
where you positioned the explosives.
RUDOLPH: The explosives we put
at the front by the torpedo tubes
and another in the periscope shaft
and the third at the back on the ammunition box.
The explosives took seven minutes to detonate.
Therefore we only had seven minutes to leave the boat
and paddle away from the submarine.
So we were quite close when it exploded.
There was a huge explosion at the stern of the boat.
NARRATOR: Despite setting three charges
Rudolph only recalls seeing one explosion.
RUDOLPH: It would make me happy if I could get some pictures of the boat.
SELCUK: I will certainly do that.
RUDOLPH: Lovely, Mr. Kolay, all the best,
I wish you success on the dive.
SELCUK: Thank you very much.
NARRATOR: Selcuk plans to dive the length of the wreck,
looking for clues to confirm which of the three explosive
charges sank the submarine.
SELCUK (off-screen): 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 (off-screen): There's an opening of about two feet by two feet
with the skin sheets bent 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 lie hidden in its inky waters waiting
to be discovered.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.