Greece opens first underwater museum, a shipwreck 2,500 years old with 4,000 wine jars that’s open to experienced scuba divers
- Scuba divers are paying US$110 to visit an ancient shipwreck off the island of Alonissos in a marine reserve in the Aegean Sea
- It is the first of a number of proposed dive sites in the area intended to attract high-paying tourists
Emerging from the crystal-clear turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea, Hans-Juergen Fercher has just returned from his fourth dive to where mounds of 2,500-year-old wine jars mark the site of an ancient shipwreck – and Greece’s first underwater museum.
“This is a combination of diving and archaeological diving. It’s diving into history,” says the 48-year-old psychiatrist after pulling himself onto the deck of the Triton dive boat. “It makes it special and unique.”
The museum beneath the waves at Peristera, a rocky outcrop off the island of Alonissos, opened in 2020, though the site has been largely mothballed until now due to Covid-19 restrictions. As Greece opens up its vital tourism industry, the site offers an example of a new and more sustainable source of revenue.
Divers like Fercher and Danish wine-cellar maker Lisette Fredelund are willing to pay €95 (US$110) a dive – about 50 per cent more than the cost of a regular recreational scuba outing – for a guided tour of a site once the preserve of professional archaeologists.
“It was just amazing,” says Fredelund. “I was just, while we were down there, trying to imagine what it had been like being on a vessel transporting wine.”