The Secrets Of Sveti Pavao

Examining the seabed off Croatia, two scuba-divers discovered a well-preserved porcelain vase. Only the richest people, as it turned out, could afford such pottery in the 16th century. 

- Marjan Ziberna

THE ADRIATIC SEA contains many shipwrecks, and diving them can be an exciting experience. It’s even more exciting when you dive a site that was previously unknown to anyone.

In the summer of 2006, two holidaying scuba-divers from Croatian dive-club Sava-Medvescak came across a vase among vestiges of an old shipwreck close to Mljet island in Dalmatia. At the time they had little idea of what an extraordinary discovery they had made, although their group’s leader, archaeologist Jurica Bezak, had an inkling that it could be important.

Bezak told his employer the Croatian Conservation Institute (CCI) about the discovery, and the following summer CCI experts, including Bezak, initiated a systematic examination of the site, and began recovering some of the items they found there.

They named it the “Sveti Pavao Shipwreck”, because it lay close to a dangerous underwater shoal of that name. The serrated rocks, set almost exactly at sea-level, were probably what had brought about the ship’s demise.

The wreck lies in the 40-50m range, so the divers’ work was laborious and difficult. At first it seemed to them that the discovery was that of a relatively unremarkable shipwreck from the 16th or 17th century.

As the work continued, however, it turned out that the vessel was most likely a Venetian merchant ship that had come to grief between 1580 and 1590, and that a substantial part of its cargo consisted of extraordinarily valuable fritware pottery from the Ottoman city of Iznik.

More than 100 examples of these ceramics have been found on the wreck and it’s a unique discovery – no other such ship has ever been found before.