PHOTO: Polish divers discovered a shipwreck from the 19th century. She was carrying precious cargo – Human – Science and technology

A team of Polish divers found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea a wreck of a ship full of luxury goods, including porcelain items or approximately hundreds of bottles of champagne and mineral water. A rare shipment from the second half of the 19th century, perhaps destined for the royal table in Stockholm or the tsar in St. Petersburg, states the leader of the team of divers, Tomasz Stachura.

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28.07.2024 21:00

Divers from Baltictech, a private group that explores the Baltic Sea and looks for wrecks, discovered the ship on July 11 while surveying an area 37 kilometers south of the Swedish island of Öland. Allegedly, they were going to call it quits for the day, but divers Marek Cacaj and Pawel Truszynski continued to dive and finally two hours later swam in with the news of a rare discovery. “I’ve been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that we find a bottle or two in a wreck, but to discover this much cargo is a first for me,” Stachura told the Associated Press.

With experience granted also on the social network. At first, divers thought the wreck was “one of the least interesting” they had discovered, he said, and suspected it was a fishing boat. However, it turned out that the vessel lying on the seabed at a depth of 58 meters is a cargo sailing ship.

The mineral water is in stoneware bottles with the Selters brand, which at the time was believed to have medicinal properties. The brand of champagne has not yet been determined, but according to Stachur, the letter R can be seen on one of the corks. The leader of the divers assumes that the contents of the bottles are still in good condition. “At this depth, the wreck is perfectly preserved, the temperature is constant, there are no currents and it is dark. It preserves the wreck in an amazing way,” he explained.

According to him, Baltictech has already been contacted by experts in the given drinks with an interest in examining them in the laboratory. However, the Swedish authorities have the decisive word on the next steps in the investigation of the wreck.

The divers from Baltictech have other achievements in addition to the above-mentioned find. For example, they found the wreck of the ship SS Karlsruhe, the last vessel that left Königsberg – today’s Kaliningrad – in 1945 as part of the evacuation of German civilians during the Second World War.