In 1975, close to the port of Kea and at a depth of 120 meters, Jacques Cousteau discovered the shipwreck of the British ship, which accidentally sank from a German mine in November 1916 while sailing to the hospital station of Limnos, carrying English wounded. With the onset of World War I, it was commanded by the British Admiralty and immediately turned into a floating hospital. Despite the fact that his design had improved significantly after the Titanic wreck, the ship sank in just 55 minutes. However, due to its proper survival equipment and close proximity to Kea, some 1,300 occupants were able to survive, while 30 only lost their lives mainly due to the early launch of lifeboats and the continued operation of the engines. Watch Video
The Britannic Shipwreck
The French oceanic Burdigala
In September 2008 the Kea Dive Expedition diving team unveiled an unknown shipwreck accidentally detected by using a side scanner a year before the Assistant Professor of the Geology Department of the University of Patras, George Papatheodorou, at a depth of 70 meters and at a distance of about 2 miles from the point of British embankment. The S / S Burdigala, a former S / S Kaiser Friedrich, built in 1897 and 180 meters long, sunk on November 14, 1916, from a mine of the same German submarine U73, a week later he sank the British. Watch Video
Patris
The luxurious steamship “The Otto” had been constructed on the river Thames by request of king Otto. Eight years later when king Otto was expelled from Greece, the steamship was renamed “Patris”. Then, on February 23rd, 1868, while the Patris was sailing from Piraeus to Syros it stuck against a shoal and sank near Koundouros of Kea. The research diving team was headed by Mr. Vasilis Mentogiannis and they supported that it was the first time such a beautiful ship had been found in the Mediterranean. Watch Video
Junkers 52
During the diving mission for the identification of S/S Burdigala, the sonar side-scanner recorded, at a close distance from Burdigala, at a depth of 65m, an unknown aircraft, which was identified by the same research diving team in the spring of 2009. It was one of the aircrafts which were used by the German army during the air operations in the Aegean sea and it was used in the battle of Crete (1941) and in the battle of Leras (1943). It is the most well-preserved of the 4 similar aircrafts that have been discovered at the bottom of the Greek seas. Watch Video
