An international archaeological team has launched a search of a Montenegrin bay after a 16-year-old British schoolboy last year uncovered the submerged remains of what could be a lost, ancient temple while snorkelling in the Adriatic.
Michael Le Quesne, then 16, was swimming off the popular beach of Maljevik, near Bar, with his parents and his ten-year-old sister when he spotted an odd looking ‘stone’ at a depth of around two metres. It turned out to be part of a large, submerged building which may have been the centrepiece of an important Greek or Roman trading post, swallowed up by the sea during a massive earthquake.
Micheal’s father, Charles, a professional archaeologist, has spent the past year assembling a team of experts to check the site and others in Montenegro, which has a largely unexplored coast. The group, which includes Dr Lucy Blue, presenter of BBC Two show Oceans, as well as, for the first time, Montenegrin marine archaeologist began work on August 23.
Mr le Quesne told Balkan Insight that the project had got off to a ‘flying start’. He said that the first searches of the stones off Maljevik beach suggest that it is ‘most likely that they are medieval, from a local quarry and possibly intended for use in the nearby Fransiscan Monastery at Ratac near Bar’.
He added that the team would also look at nearby Bigovica Bay, an ancient harbour just south of Bar with a series of wrecks dating from the Second Century BC to late antiquity. In 2003, archaeologists Louise Schofield and Sean Kingsley described Montenegro as both a “dream and a nightmare”.
In a piece for an academic jounral, they added: “One is hard pressed to think of any other European country whose archaeological landscape remains so enigmatically terra incognita. Because Montenegro has for centuries comprised the periphery of empires and nations, historically its cultural heritage has tended to be neglected. In terms of potential, however, it is over-ripe for picking.”
Author: Lawrence Marzouk | Source: Balkan Insight [September 03, 2010]