The Champagne Shipwreck: A Czar’s Lost Gifts on the Baltic Seabed
In the summer of 2024, two Polish divers drifting over the dark floor of the Baltic Sea found a cargo hold packed with rows of unbroken bottles: hundreds of bottles of champagne, luxury mineral water in clay jugs, and crates of fine porcelain. Two years of detective work in the archives of Europe suggested what they had really found: a ship that sank in the 1850s carrying a gift fit for an emperor, a peace offering from a German duke to the czar of all the Russias, that never arrived.