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256 / DEATH ON THE BLACK SEA
they broke with the British diver in the summer of 2000, the Turks re- sumed their diving in earnest, feeling that a race was on.
“It is part of our history,” said Murat Draman, one of the lead Turkish divers. “For years, people have talked about this ship. The fishermen knew about the Struma. They fish all around there. They like to fish there because the fish like to live near the wrecks. All the Turkish divers knew about the Struma, but no one liked to talk about it. There were bad feelings. It was a tragedy. It was not just a Jewish tragedy, but an important part of history that shows the mistakes made by many countries.”
When the Turks resumed diving for the ship in June 2000, they ex- amined three possible sites in a series of twelve dives with a team of seventeen to eighteen divers. The first site turned out to be a tugboat, and the second was much larger than the Struma’s dimensions, possi- bly a cargo ship. The third site, they believed, was the lost refugee ship. It was lying on its side at a depth of about two hundred fifty feet, about six miles from shore.
The initial dives were inconclusive. The Turks said the dimensions seemed right—about one hundred fifty feet long, eighteen feet wide. The wreck was covered with seaweed and mud, and the visibility was low, which made it difficult to make out details and impossible to photograph from far enough away to get a good image of the entire site.
On July 16, the team returned for a final dive at the same site. When the dive team reached the bottom, they found that an unusually strong current had cleared away much of the sediment in the water. They were able to get a good view of the ship, and the divers took photographs and video footage. They could make out features that they thought indicated it was the Struma: The wooden superstructure built at the stern for the captain appeared to be visible, and the shape of the hull and number of decks seemed to match photographs and de- scriptions of the ship. The Turks were convinced they had found the Struma, fifty-eight years after it had disappeared.
However, the final steps that would have confirmed the identity of the vessel were not taken. Because they considered the wreck a grave site, the Turks said they decided not to touch anything. They did not...
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