SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The war in Ukraine has touched all aspects of life in that country, including the nation's archaeological sites. Now a team of maritime experts are racing to try to save an 18th century shipwreck discovered on a small island. NPR's Hanna Palamarenko visited the archaeological dig in the southeast of the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
HANNA PALAMARENKO, BYLINE: The island is called Khortytsia, and it's not far from the frontline. It has been a wartime base for centuries.
FRED HOCKER: This is an archeological site. This is where the Russian army camped in the 1730s for the Russo-Turkish War.
PALAMARENKO: Fred Hocker is a maritime archaeologist. NPR met his team when they traveled to Khortytsia late this summer.
HOCKER: The site has been known, and the people from the National Reserve here on Khortytsia have been excavating different parts of this for over 25 years.
PALAMARENKO: Hocker is the head of research at Vasa Museum and the Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums in Stockholm. He's tall and tan with a trim gray beard.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
HOCKER: Wow.
PALAMARENKO: Hocker walks along a woodsy path to meet Ukrainian and American colleagues. They're on this leafy island to salvage and preserve a shipwreck from the 18th century, when there was war between the Ottoman and Russian empires.
HOCKER: The wreck we're excavating from that 1738 fleet is one of the things that was not just exposed, but threatened by the changed level of the river.
PALAMARENKO: In June 2023, Russian forces destroyed a major Ukrainian dam upstream, exposing some ships that had been underwater.
CATHY GREEN: Once you have water-logged wood exposed, it's vulnerable and will fall apart very quickly once it dries out.
PALAMARENKO: That's Cathy Green, another member of the team. She's the president of the National Maritime Historical Society in the U.S. She stands over the shipwreck, her blond hair tied back under a yellow baseball cap.
PRESIDENT, NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY: This is a really interesting site because it's not a singular vessel. It's a part of this larger maritime landscape. There's a whole battlefield here.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIMBING OVER ROCKS)
PALAMARENKO: Above the sandy beach, tents are pitched on the rocks. The archaeologists usually start their day by gathering here.
(SOUNDBITE OF KETTLE WHISTLING)
PALAMARENKO: They chat over cups of tea and coffee...
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST #1: (Speaking Ukrainian).
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST #2: (Speaking Ukrainian).
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST #3: (Speaking Ukrainian).
UNIDENTIFIED ARCHAEOLOGIST: (Speaking Ukrainian).
PALAMARENKO: ...Then walk to the site to meet Dmytro Kobaliya.
HOCKER: Firefighter...
PALAMARENKO: He's Ukrainian and the lead archaeologist for the Khortytsia National Reserve.
HOCKER: So what do you want to get done today?
PALAMARENKO: Kobaliya gazes at the waves of the Dnipro River glistening in the sun.
DMYTRO KOBALIYA: (Speaking Ukrainian).
PALAMARENKO: "Back in the 1700s," he says, "you could see almost 300 ships here."
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER LAPPING)
PALAMARENKO: Fred Hocker points to brown wooden fragments in the sand.
HOCKER: So this is the wreck that we've excavated here. It's the first 6 meters at the bow of a troop transport - a chaloup, they call them - that was originally about 18 meters long. So this is about a third of it.
PALAMARENKO: The archaeologists remove the fragments, then submerge them in water to avoid deterioration.
(SOUNDBITE OF DIGGING)
PALAMARENKO: Another member of the team, Larry Babits, is shoveling sand into a big hole where the wreckage was found. He's a military and maritime archaeologist and a retired professor.
LARRY BABITS: Can I talk about politics?
PALAMARENKO: Yes, yes, yes.
He says the ship they're working on dates back to a much earlier war of Russian expansion.
BABITS: Today, this river is 20 miles from the front as the Russians tried to take property and land from a country that was freely independent, and that hasn't changed.
PALAMARENKO: The city of Zaporizhzhia, which Khortytsia Island is part of, is often hit by Russian bombs and missiles. The archaeologists said they drew up wills before traveling to Ukraine. Hocker said there were attacks during their three-week stay here.
HOCKER: The bus station has been destroyed. A supermarket was hit by an - I think, an Iskander missile, and, you know, there're air alerts all the time.
PALAMARENKO: For him, the rewards of rescuing history outweigh the risks.
HOCKER: This war is partly about the survival of an idea, the idea of Ukraine as a country, that part of that survival is not just guns and bombs and bullets. Part of that survival is the survival of ideas.
PALAMARENKO: Dmytro Kobaliya, the Ukrainian archaeologist, spent 2 1/2 years on the front line, fighting in some of the fiercest battles against the Russians.
KOBALIYA: (Speaking Ukrainian).
PALAMARENKO: "And this is also part of our history," he says. "We must preserve it in order to understand who we are and who we are dealing with."
(SOUNDBITE OF DIGGING)
HOCKER: Here we are. It's clear.
PALAMARENKO: As the team finishes the day's work, I ask Fred Hocker what he would remember most about this expedition.
HOCKER: Well, it had nothing to do with archaeology.
PALAMARENKO: It happened one Friday night when the team went to hear a local jazz band.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) My sweet, Georgia.
PALAMARENKO: He recorded this video. As he listened to the music, he realized how much this expedition and the backdrop of war had affected him.
HOCKER: You know, one of the ways that we deal with the risk is you just suppress those thoughts and those emotions. But they started playing an old jazz standard, "Georgia On My Mind, " and almost all of us broke down in tears.
PALAMARENKO: A few days later, Hocker, Green and Babits leave Ukraine. They promised their Ukrainian colleagues that they would return.
Hanna Palamarenko, NPR News on Khortytsia Island in southeastern Ukraine.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BUDOS BAND'S "GHOST WALK") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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