Jars off Turkey's Kekova may come from the oldest known shipwreck, up to 4,700 years old

Divers off Kekova, an island on Turkey's southwest coast, have found about 30 metres down more than 30 Early Bronze Age storage jars from what may be the oldest shipwreck known. Turkey's culture minister, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced the find on 14 October under the slogan "Mavi Vatan" (Blue Homeland), the doctrine behind Turkish maritime claims that Greece and Cyprus dispute.

The team is led by Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University. With no timber surviving, the date, between about 4,400 and 4,700 years ago, rests on the shape of the jars, which match pottery from Egypt, Troy and Crete; the Dokos wreck in Greece, of about 2200 BCE, long held that place. The university recorded the site in 2024 and lifted jars then and in 2025; a wider excavation under the Antalya Museum Directorate followed this year. According to Ersoy, clay analysis suggests some jars were made in the Jordan Valley. He proposed that one jar, with two holes and nine marks, was a churn for butter or cheese. Three stone anchors nearby are not yet firmly tied to the wreck. The team suggests the ship sailed west from the Levant, perhaps for Troy or Crete. The finds are being conserved for a planned underwater archaeology museum in Antalya.

Cyprus has no wreck that old; its Early Bronze Age seafaring is known indirectly, through marine shells carried inland to Marki-Alonia from the Philia phase on and a doubtful boat model from a tomb at Bellapais-Vounous.