An international team of French and Croatian specialists has managed to recover near intact pieces of an ancient hand-sewn boat and transport them to nearby Umag for expert analysis.
Thought to date back to around 1,100 BC, the vessel was first spotted by a fisherman in 2008, only 600 metres from a popular tourist beach in the Bay of Zambratija. Seeing small holes in the planks, he immediately twigged that it might have been sewn together – a technique used on the Nile several centuries earlier – and alerted the local museum.
While raising interesting questions about how and when this sewing method came to northern Croatia, the boat now underpins a major research project between the French organisation ADRIBOATS, based in Aix-en-Provence, Zadar University and the Archaeological Museum of Istria.