- A sacral object in the village of Garlo resembles megaliths in Sardinia
- They are repairing the road to the oldest Well Temple in Europe
One of the most ancient sites near Pernik will very soon become the major attraction of the region after the road to it is reconstructed. It is about the oldest well-temple in Europe – near the village of Garlo in Bresni, which dates back to the late Bronze Age and is an underground vaulted hall built over a well to which a staircase leads. At the moment, the unique megalithic site, located in the small area with the eerie name “Empty Throat”, can only be visited by a difficult hike through the mountainous terrain.
The creation of better access conditions will increase the opportunities for further exploration of the site and for the development of tourism in this little-known area.
An archaeologist comes across the ancient monument
The megalith is located to the west of the Klisura gorge, formed by the Krasavska river, on the northern part of the Greben mountain. The discoverer of the temple-well Prof. Dimitrina Mitova-Djonova (1972) connects it with an early phase of the Nuragi culture, which a little later built buildings on Fr. Sardinia. The remarkable similarity to the covered well in Balao gives grounds for dating it to the 12th-10th centuries BC. Cultural-historical interpretations of the building remain largely hypothetical due to the unsystematic scientific research to date.
While looking for an analogue of the well-temple of “Empty Throat”, Prof. Mitova-Jonova came across the Proto-Sardinian culture and its sacred wells (pozzo di sacro), which number about 70.
In 1982 she went to Sardinia where she visited most of the sacred wells and towers of the Nuragi. This allows her to establish a complete correspondence, such as construction and dimensions, between the Hellene temple and one of the Sardinian temples – the one at Balao.
Archaeologists assume that ours near the village of Garlo is the oldest temple in our lands and was built before the time of the Thracians. Dimitrina Mitova-Djonova claims that such temples are not characteristic of the civilizations that inhabited today’s Bulgarian lands. According to the descriptions, these are arranged in a row of rough stone pillars, often accompanying the Nuragi culture.
Directly above the temple was a sanctuary. Today, the rock massif and the terrain of the holy place are covered by a young forest. The construction of the megalithic structure and the entire cult complex near the village of Garlo, despite the conclusions reached, remains an absolute mystery for Bulgarian archaeology.
The secret of the megalithic monument
The facility is built in a cozy little hollow, which in prehistoric times was dotted with many springs. The southern part of the temple-well is dug into the ground. A corridor about 7 meters long, with 13 stone steps, leads to a circular hall, in the center of which a well with a depth of 5 meters is built above the spring. The circular hall has a hemispherical domed cover with an opeion (a circular opening like a flue) in the center.
The uncovered bones of sacrificial animals testify to the cultic nature of the megalithic building. Besides them, the scientists found a fragment of a stone ax, a clay vessel and a brown glass cup, as well as primitively processed pieces of oak. The dating of the site is controversial (due to the small number of artifacts), but in fact there is no site with similar architecture on the territory of Bulgaria. In terms of plan and construction, the examined site comes very close to the domed tombs built by the ancient Thracians, but it is completely out of the question that any human corpse was placed in contact with the “holy water”.
However, no one knows for sure what the place was used for. Some researchers believe that it is an ancient solar calendar, and others that it was used as an observatory to measure the seasons. There is also a theory that this is a cult object in which the inhabitants of these lands about 3000 years ago worshiped the main natural elements – sun, earth, water.
The mystique that wanders around it ignites the imagination not only of researchers who are puzzled about its purpose, but also of tourists and lovers of mysteries from antiquity.
Photos uploaded on the Internet and stories about visits to the megalithic structure, hidden in the bosom of Greben Mountain, cause curiosity and a thrill of discovery in every person.
The roots of the type of architecture that characterizes the well-temple take us back millennia – to ancient Mesopotamia. So it is likely that the temple at Gurlo was created by descendants of the Sumerians. There is a hypothesis that a large group of Sumerians migrated to today’s Bulgarian lands in search of deposits of copper and other ores. Then they continued to Sardinia, which turned out to be better in this respect, and stayed there. But while they were staying on our lands, the wreckers carved out the structure near the village of Garlo.
Archaeologists (at least the handful of them who have explored the site) are unanimous that this well-temple is older than the Thracian megaliths in the Rhodopes, Strandja and Sakar. It is far more primitive and certainly has nothing to do with Thracian culture.
The simplest explanation is that it glorifies the elements of life, and is not dedicated to death and memory, as it is with our Thracian predecessors. Another hypothesis is exercised on the purpose of the object. Its authors boldly assume that the temple-well was something like an ancient telescope. Ancient astronomers tracked the movement of celestial bodies with the help of a parabolic metal mirror made of copper, silver or gold mounted at the bottom of the well.
Well temples around the world
Ancient underground wells (pozzo di sacro) were discovered not only on Fr. Sardinia, where they number 70, but also in several other places in the world, such as the Greek Fr. Kea, near the sanctuary of Asclepius on the territory of the Greek colony Panticapae near the present-day city of Kerch (on the Crimean peninsula), near El-Ahuat in Israel, as well as on the territory of former Carthage (today in Tunisia).
In Sardinia, megalithic structures abounded long before the Nuragi culture. There in the third millennium BC. there is a developed prehistoric culture. At the end of the second millennium BC, after the invasion of the so-called “sea peoples” coming from the eastern Mediterranean, knowledge of the mining and processing of metals spread to the island, which is why the old richly decorated tombs were replaced by the construction of Nuragi towers.
The people of the Nuragic culture were an Indo-European people. It is accepted that the proto-Sardinian culture has a Mesopotamian character and that its carriers are the sea people Shardeni (also called Sardinians or Sordons), who gave the island its name. The Nuragic culture existed until the migration of the Etruscans from Asia Minor to this region. Some artifacts from the Nuragic culture show analogies with Etruscan art and with similar wares from the Eastern Mediterranean. The architecture of the buildings created by the Nuragi culture is the most advanced and sophisticated of any existing in the western Mediterranean since the Late Bronze Age, even compared to the ancient Greek colonies that arose in Sardinia after the 7th century BC.
And if we go back to Bulgaria, it is sad that today the megalithic building near the village of Garlo in Bresni, considered one of the most ancient in our lands, is left to crumble, abandoned to the will of the natural elements and treasure hunters.
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