Visitors entering the gallery at the far end of the Yigal Allon Center can spend time in the presence of the spectacular ancient boat, watch a film about the boat and its discovery, and see photos from that exciting historic day.
Measuring some 8 meters in length (!), the ancient wooden boat was discovered practically intact on the bottom of the Kinneret in January 1986. Scientists dated the boat to some 2,000 years ago, the early days of our history, in the exact place and time Jesus was active in the region. The boat’s body is made of 12 different types of wood, all mentioned in the Bible.
The ancient boat was discovered near the shore of Ginosar, not far from the Magdala shore. The brothers Yuval and Moshe Lopen, members of Kibbutz Ginosar, found the boat while searching the Kinneret Lake ground after large parts were exposed following a drought that caused the waters to recede.
A huge double rainbow appeared in the sky at the exact moment when the boat was revealed, fascinating the witnesses of the event, who documented it in a photo displayed in the gallery.
This momentous, hugely important finding has excited historians, archeologists, theologians and believers, tourists and visitors in Israel and worldwide.
Expert archeologists from the Israel Antiquity Authority, with the help of many volunteers, managed the complex excavation of the boat from its muddy entrapment in a careful dig completed in ten euphoric days.
After a 2,000-year-long rest on the muddy lake ground, the boat was once again on the Kinneret, now sailing toward a building adjacent to the Yigal Allon Center in Ginosar erected especially for its preservation.
Scientists preserved the boat in a water pool inside this building. They treated it with novel preservation techniques for 14 years until 2000, when they deemed it ready to be moved into the visitor gallery, where it remains today. You are welcome to come and see it!
The period when the boat was active is of particular historical meaning: the shores of the Kinneret were where Jesus, his followers and fishermen friends lived, as we learn from the New Testament. The facts are very moving: it is the only surviving boat from precisely in the area of Magdala where Jesus was active and near Ginoser, exactly the place toward which his followers sailed through rough waters in the famous tempestuous night: “And having crossed over they came to the land of Gennesaret” (Matthew 14:34)
This is naturally of enormous importance to believers, who come to see, learn and spend time by the actual boat.
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