The project began at the Odesa Archaeological Museum, where Professor Vladimir N. Stanko and a team of researchers had spent years studying ancient illustrations on vases and stone reliefs, comparing them against written sources and archaeological evidence for ancient ship construction. They chose to reconstruct a bireme — a galley with oars at two levels — because the evidence suggested it was the most widely used vessel in the northern Black Sea region during antiquity. The famous trireme, with three banks of oars, was built for combat: fast, powerful, but demanding in crew and maintenance. The bireme was the workhorse. It was the ship that carried colonists, traders, and explorers across the Mediterranean world. The technical design was carried out by specialists from the Nikolayev University of Shipbuilding, and the Black Sea Shipping Company provided the primary funding.

Starting from Odesa in 1989, *Ivlia* began tracing the routes of the ancient mariners. Over six expedition seasons between 1989 and 1994, the vessel covered more than 3,000 nautical miles, visiting over 50 European ports. She sailed the Black Sea, passed through the Dardanelles into the Aegean, crossed the Mediterranean, and entered the Atlantic. She participated in international maritime festivals: Colombo'92 in Genoa, Brest'92, Cancal'93, and Vieux Greements'94 in France. Sailing up the Seine, she reached Paris, where the Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, came aboard. Over those six seasons, more than 200 crew members participated — citizens of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, France, Greece, and Georgia — taking turns at the oars in waters the ancient Greeks had crossed in identical craft.

The expedition's scientific program was extensive. Researchers studied the ship's seaworthiness, measured water salinity and contamination along the route, and tested hypotheses about ancient navigation. The results surprised some in the scholarly world. *Ivlia* performed well even in tailwinds of Beaufort 7 — strong enough to make a modern sailor cautious. This supported an argument that many scholars had resisted: ancient mariners were probably not the timid coastal-huggers of popular imagination. An unlit coast, in antiquity, was more dangerous than the open sea. Pirate threats lurked near shore. Ancient sailors, the team argued, were likely capable of open-sea crossings, navigating by stars, and using prevailing winds and currents with considerable sophistication. The biremes — not the combat triremes — were the vessels of exploration. It was almost certainly in biremes that the Carthaginian explorer Hanno sailed beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and Pytheas of Massalia made his legendary voyage toward the island of Thule.

*Ivlia* carried at her bow a bronze ram in the form of a wild boar's head — the aggressive ornament of an ancient warship, cast to break the hull of an enemy vessel at ramming speed. It was an authentic touch, based on the iconographic record. The ship was built to test history by living it, and for six years she did exactly that. Then the expeditions ended, and she was stored at the maritime museum in La Rochelle, France. The museum burned, and *Ivlia* was destroyed in the fire. The vessel that had proved the ancient world's maritime capabilities ended not in the sea but in smoke. What survives are the data, the publications, and the conviction — established through salt and wind and hard rowing — that the ancient Greeks knew far more about the ocean than we had given them credit for.