Greek Underwater Museum - 27 August, 2021

The doors of a new kind of museum have metaphorically opened in Greece. The first underwater museum in the country, due to open in 2020 but set back by the pandemic, is now ready for scuba diving tourists.

Situated beneath the waves of Peristera, off the island of Alonissos, it is the site of a shipwreck, where visitors are able to see mounds of 2,500 year old wine pots that the ship was transporting.

For Lisette Fredelund, a wine cellar maker from Denmark, it was this that pulled her to the dive.

Lisette Fredelund: "It was with a different perspective. We are not watching only marine life or corals but watching ancient civilizations. I was just, while we were down there trying to imagine what it had been like being on a vessel transporting wine from one shore to another. It was just amazing."

For those who don't want to physically go to the depths of the deep blue sea, the museum offers a virtual reality exhibition. This enables visitors to virtually study the exhibits. However, for Hans Jurgen Fercher from Austria, it is just this combination of diving and archaeology that's so attractive.

Hans Jurgen Fercher: "It makes it special and unique that it's a combination of diving and archaeological diving. It's diving into history. It makes this place live and live again, so this is what touches me."

Costing around 95 euros, the guided tours are just 50 percent more expensive than those with a purely recreational aim. But it is hoped that this type of archaeological dive will prove to be a more sustainable form of tourism. This, in turn, will help the surrounding islands.

Following the discovery of four more wrecks nearby, Dive Centre founder Kostas Efstathiou hopes the project can help turn Alonissos into a celebrated diving location.

Kostas Efstathiou: "We are very excited to have another four wrecks in the following two years and that is really going to put Alonissos on the world diving map. We are going to have like an underwater safari of ancient wrecks."