Marble column pieces journey from the deep to Bodrum museum

The unmistakable smell of objects long lost at sea wafted from the truck standing in front of Bodrum Castle on Wednesday morning. The truck had arrived in the early hours of the morning after its long journey down from Ceşme Harbor, where it had been loaded with 30 tons of enormous marble pieces excavated from an ancient shipwreck off the remote rocky cape at Kızılburun.

Emre Savaş, an archaeologist from the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology who accompanied the transport, said the six pieces from the excavation include two column drums weighing seven tons each and a column capital that had been excavated at a depth of 46 meters. They were first pulled from the seabed by a boat-mounted crane before beginning the 4-hour trip back to Ceşme Harbor and then onto the truck.

On their journey south, the column pieces actually passed near the ancient site of Claros, thought to have been their original destination 2,000 years ago.

The logistical exercise was completed once the pieces were deposited at the castle grounds. Now begins a long conservation process that will see the removal of encrustation built up over two millennia.

The excavation is attracting worldwide attention. It has been featured on the front cover of the of the current issue of “Archaeology,” the Archaeological Institute of America’s magazine, with a photo from the excavation, and has been noted as one of the 10 most interesting underwater excavations worldwide. The Turkish magazine “Aktuel Arkeoloji” has also featured the excavation.

Since 2005, a team of Turkish and American archaeologists from the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University has been excavating the remains of an ancient stone carrier that sunk in the 1st century B.C. off Kızılburun, which lies along the Karaburun peninsula, southeast of Çeşme, to a depth of 45 to 48 meters.

First located by INA-Bodrum Museum survey teams in the early 90s, the shipwreck site was immediately marked as unique. Unlike the vast majority of ancient Mediterranean shipwrecks, which are characterized by the presence of piles of two-handled clay transport jars called amphorae, the ship that sank at Kızılburun was transporting a stone cargo made up of eight massive marble column drums and a roughly-worked capital in the Doric style. Viewed underwater neatly lined up just as they were originally loaded on the carrier, they were an impressive sight. Stacked together, these nine pieces would have comprised one monumental column almost 10 meters tall; their impressive size suggests that the column parts were destined for the façade of an ancient temple.

In 2006, the excavation team began moving the enormous marble column drums away from the shipwreck so that they could recover and study any surviving timbers of the ship’s wooden hull. This week, three of the marble column pieces were raised to the surface after more than 2,000 years under water and delivered to the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, where they will spend the next few years being cleaned and conserved for ongoing research.

Excavation director Professor Deborah Carlson explained the importance of these three pieces. She said that each of the eight drums in its cargo weighed about seven tons, so had to be raised in small groups. One of three pieces is the Doric capital that sat on top of the column shaft. The other two are the largest and smallest column drums. No two of the eight column drums from the Kızılburun shipwreck are exactly the same size – but all of them vary only slightly in diameter.

The largest drum has four small rectangular protrusions or “feet.” These feet are the bosses designed to facilitate the final positioning of the drum by sliding it along a stone foundation; their presence confirms not only that this drum was designed to be on the bottom, but also that the ship was definitely transporting a column of the Doric order, since Doric columns sat directly atop the foundation course and not atop a base like Ionic and Corinthian columns.

Other artifacts from the ship’s cargo include two large marble basins with separate pedestal bases, and one dozen grave stelai without inscriptions. The Excavation of these large marble blocks has revealed the remains of several bronze buckets or pots, ceramic wine jugs, drinking cups, plates, oil lamps, and transport amphorae from different cities around the Mediterranean and Black seas. Another unusual find is a terracotta herm – whose name comes from the Greek god Hermes, protector of travelers and merchants. In the ancient world herms had a magical, protective function, and it may be that the Kızılburun herm served as the ship’s patron icon.

One of the most intriguing questions about the Kızılburun shipwreck concerns the final destination of the marble column, particularly because Doric architecture on a monumental scale is rare in the first century B.C. Isotopic analysis has shown that the Kızılburun marbles were quarried on Marmara Island, and archaeological director Carlson thinks that the column may have been destined for the Temple of Apollo at Claros. She has been working with archaeologists at Claros and they are expected in Bodrum in the next few days to see the Kızılburun drums on land for the first time.

The Institute of Nautical Archaeology has been excavating shipwrecks in Turkey for almost 50 years. Artifacts from all INA excavations are stored in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. Museum visitors can see hulls, cargoes and personal items from the Bronze Age shipwreck at Uluburun (1300 B.C.), the Classical Greek shipwreck at Tektaş Burnu (425 B.C.), the Byzantine ship at Yassı Ada (A.D. 625) and the Medieval “Glass” Wreck at Serçe Limanı (A.D. 1025).