A Worker Found a 200-Year-Old Shipwreck Beneath the Real ‘Game of Thrones’ Capital

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

A worker doing water pipeline work discovered an 18th-century wooden boat in Old Town Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Located on the seafloor within the old port district, experts confirmed the boat’s dating through radiocarbon analysis.
The UNESCO protected heritage site is a popular tourist attraction, especially since it’s a Game of Thrones filming location.

King’s Landing is located on the fictional continent of Westeros in Game of Thrones, but there’s been a real-life discovery of an 18th-century shipwreck in the real-life shooting location, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Ivan Bukelic was doing work on a water pipeline in the historic city’s seabed when he discovered a wooden boat half-buried about three feet below the seafloor near the old port, which was later confirmed to be over 200 years old.

“I can now say I discovered a boat at the Old Town Dubrovnik,” he told the Associated Press.

Dubrovnik, a popular summer tourist destination in the Adriatic Sea, served as a pivotal trading port during medieval times. It has since been named a UNESCO protected heritage site. But it may be better known now as a filming location for HBO’s Game of Thrones. The show’s production used the site as King’s Landing, capital of the Seven Kingdoms on the continent of Westeros (it’s also appeared as the trading post Qarth on the southern coast of the show’s fictional continent Essos).

The details of Bukelic’s boat find are being kept hidden. “We still cannot speak of the type of vessel or its dimensions, but we can say for certain, based on the results of radiocarbon analysis, that it was from late 18th century,” Irena Radic Rossi, marine archaeologist, told AP.

Known as the Pearl of the Adriatic on the Dalmatian coast, Old City of Dubrovnik rose to power in the Mediterranean beginning in the 13th century, power that lasted until an earthquake in 1667. The city was severely damaged in the quake, although many of the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque churches, monasteries, palaces, and fountains were preserved. Armed fighting during the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s again damaged the city, but UNESCO hopes a major restoration program can restore more of Dubrovnik.

The boat is now being protected with the help of Croatia’s Ministry of Culture with plans to dig deeper into the discovery. “We must,” Rossi said, “protect it for the future.”

In other recent European shipwreck news, a routine sonar investigation of the French seafloor led to the accidental discovery of a 16th-century shipwreck roughly 1.5 miles off the coast of Ramatuelle in France. The wreck, nestled 8,200 feet underwater, is the deepest shipwreck ever discovered in the country. The depth also makes it one of the most well-preserved, free from salvaging and looters.

For those looking for high value treasure with their shipwrecks, news continues to flow from the “holy grail of shipwrecks” off the coast of Colombia, where the San Jose was found in 2015 and is believed to hold $17 billion (modern-day value) worth of Spanish fortune. A recent investigation of the wreck site caught glimpses of gold coins scattered along the seafloor.

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