site.btaRescue Expedition Adds 200-Year Black Sea Wreckage Cannons to National History Museum Exhibits

A rescue expedition just before Christmas, on December 23, salvaged two cannons and dozens of munitions of over 200 years from the seabed off the northern Bulgarian Black Sea coast. The team of the Centre for Underwater Archaeology (CUA), headed by Nayden Prahov, succeeded in the 30-hour operation despite the cold water, low visibility and complicated logistics.

The expedition was part of a long contemplated joint project with the National History Museum. Prahov found the guns during a dive in 2021, but it was only at the end of 2022 and thanks to support from the Ministry of Culture, that the shipwreck artefacts were retrieved and taken to the museum. The divers were also helped by the head of the Historical Museum in Kavarna, as well as Border Police staff.

It was literally at the end of December when the team went to the spot where they knew the shipwreck was, recorded the cannon again with photogrammetry and cameras and then recovered them from the seabed. That was done with a fishing boat with a crane with which the heavy cannon were lifted out of the water successfully, Prahov told BTA. He assumes that each weights over 350-400 kilos.

At the terrain archaeological reports organized by the National Archaeological Institute with Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in the beginning of 2022, Prahov shared it was probably a matter of time for the cannon to be stolen and sold, as it has already happened with dozens of others along the northern Black Sea coast. 

Divers told archaeologists of at least 80 such cases since the 1990s whose fate is unknown today, Prahov said then and added that the two by Kaliakra are among the few remaining.

Initial analysis dates the cannons at the end of the 18th – the beginning of the 19th century. They were part of the armament of a three-mast ship-of-the-line which sank in unknown circumstances north of Cape Kaliakra. The precise location of the shipwreck is confidential.

In addition to the underwater survey and recovery of the cannons from the bottom of the Black Sea, the tasks of the project include radiographic survey and conservation of the shipwreck remains at the National History Museum’s Central Laboratory for Conservation and Restoration.

The cannons and the other items from the ships inventory will be exhibited in the museum’s lapidarium in 2023, thus expanding the collection. The national museum already has the largest collection of anchors and stocks in the country. The latest maritime artefacts mark the beginning of a collection of West European, Russian and Turkish ship armaments found at the bottom of the Black Sea.