19th century ship found near the Dnipro island of Khortytsia
The wreck of a ship that sunk to the bottom of the Dnipro River in the 19th century has been discovered by a pair of archaeologists and employees of the Khortytsia National Reserve, in south-eastern Ukraine.
Vyacheslav Zaitsev, one of the National Reserve employees that discovered the wreck, wrote about the find in his blog.
Zaitsev, along with Dmytro Kobaliia, both archaeologists and National Reserve employees, discovered the flat-bottomed ship during the opening of the diving season. However, they say that further details are currently impossible to determine.
“Together with Dmytro Kobaliia, I examined a wooden ship (from approximately the end of the 19th century, although it is difficult to determine the date),” Zaitsev wrote on his blog.
“(It is) a flat-bottomed cargo ship with a length of about 15 meters in the watery area of the Dnipro, not far from Khortytsia Island.”
National Reserve employees will investigate the discovery once the weather conditions improve – the river water currently has poor visibility.
“The water is plus three degrees; visibility is poor due to the melting snow. We’re waiting for frost,” added Zaitsev.
Previously, NV reported on another unique historical find uncovered in 2020 in the area of the village of Bilenke in Zaporizhzhia region, by famed archaeologist and head of the Khortytsia National Reserve Restoration Department Valerii Nefedov.
While exploring the bottom of a nearby river, he discovered an old oak, iron-bound artillery carriage, the wheels of which, unfortunately, had not been preserved.
“There are only a few such finds in the world,” Nefedov said at the time.
“Most likely, this carriage is associated with the period of the Russo-Turkish war in the 1730s. We discovered it during our archaeological research. Only a small part of the gun’s carriage protruded out from the river bottom. And at first we thought that it was a fragment of a ship’s deck, or just some small detail, but from the structural elements it became clear that this was an artillery gun carriage,” the archaeologist said.
Khortytsia was the site of various conflicts in the 18th century, according to historians. The Dnipro at the time was a powerful throughway along which goods and weapons were transported, before the construction of the Oleksandrivska Fortress in Zaporizhzhia in the 18th century, which successfully controlled passage along the river.
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