Serce Port Byzantine Shipwreck

The Byzantine shipwreck of Serçe Limanı is one of the most important underwater archaeological finds ever made in Turkey. In 1973, a Turkish sponge diver named Mehmet Aşkın reported an unusual wreck site in this sheltered bay on the Bozburun Peninsula to the newly founded Institute of Nautical Archaeology, setting off years of careful excavation.

Between 1977 and 1979, archaeologists led by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Texas A&M University recovered an 11th-century merchant ship that had been sheltering here from a storm when it was driven onto the rocks and sank in about 33 metres of water. Its cargo told a remarkable story of Mediterranean trade: the ship carried tons of raw and broken glass, along with intact vessels, gathered from ports of the Fatimid Caliphate on the coast of present-day Lebanon or Israel.

Because of that cargo the wreck is often called the "Glass Wreck," and the reconstructed hull and its finds are now the centrepiece of the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. The bay where it all happened remains one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Marmaris, its cliff-bound entrance giving no hint of the history resting on the seabed below.