The "Bremen Cog" from the Hanseatic era - 600 years of history at which to marvel

The "Bremen Cog" is the best preserved medieval merchant ship in the world. In our exhibition you can learn more about life on board, the construction method and today's fascination around the shipwreck of 1380

The discovery of the shipwreck in the Weser in 1962was a sensation. The wooden remains turned out to be a cargo ship from the Hanseatic era. Ships with a similar appearance were previously only known as depictions on old seals of the Hanseatic cities. The elaborate recovery of the wreck in individual parts, the reconstruction in the German Maritime Museum and the years of conservation of the ship caused an international sensation. It took almost 40 years since the discovery until the preserved ship could be shown to the public in the museum's Cog Hall. Since its discovery, the "Bremen Cog" has always been an object of maritime interdisciplinary research. The exhibition around the Cog, which opened in 2017, now shows the more than 600-year-old shipwreck in the light of recent research.

The wreck of the cargo ship "Bremen Cog" is still the object of research

After the successful conservation of the cog with the synthetic wax polyethylene glycol (PEG), modern methods of preventive conservation such as photogrammetric examinations are used today. This allows possible deformations of the wood to be detected and appropriate measures to protect the object to be taken. From 2014 to 2016, the German Maritime Museum participated with the "Bremen Cog" in the "Colour and Space in Cultural Heritage" (COSCH) programme funded by the European Union, which is dedicated to the development of new technologies for the documentation of cultural heritage. An interdisciplinary team from the departments of archaeology, history and archaeozoology conducted research from 2015 to 2018 into the history of medieval shipbuilding and the North Atlantic trade of Hanseatic merchants as part of the Leibniz research project "Between the North Sea and the North Sea: Interdisciplinary Research on the Hanseatic League". Results of the project have been incorporated into the new exhibition. An ongoing project deals with the symbolic meaning and pictorial history of "cogs" in the 19th and 20th centuries.