Around 1847, Henry Manning, a London carpenter, started building houses in components that could be easily stowed on ships and reassembled by emigrants on the other side of an ocean. Several hundred “Manning cottages” were shipped to Australia. It turns out, however, that Manning was a late-comer to prefabricated buildings. Byzantine Emperor Justinian, over a thousand years before, was dispatching ships carrying prefabricated marble churches from quarries around the Sea of Marmara to sites in Italy and North Africa. Some of the ships never made it to port. As reported by the Belfast Telegraph:  In the 1960s, German archaeologist Gerhard Kapitan excavated a shipwreck off the south-east coast of Sicily. Hundreds of prefabricated marble elements of the basilica were brought to the surface, including 28 columns, slabs and pieces of a pulpit. Much still remains on the seabed and the site has been under investigation again since 2012.

Now the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will assemble  marble pieces of the church from the shipwreck as a part o f their exhibition called Storms, War And Shipwrecks: Treasures From The Sicilian Seas. The museum’s director has joked that he hopes putting the church together will be “easier than an Ikea wardrobe“.