stonecu

[eyescratch at gmail.com]

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/05/14/world/ 
15bosnia_stonecu.jpg
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http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/05/14/world/ 
20060515_BOSNIA_SLIDESHOW_1.html

May 15, 2006
Some See a 'Pyramid' to Hone Bosnia's Image. Others See a Big Hill.

By CRAIG S. SMITH
VISOKO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Semir Osmanagic stopped to shake hands  
and have his photograph taken with a group of mud-flecked Bosnian  
villagers, pickaxes in hand, on a steep hillside above this small  
medieval trading town on a bend of the Bosna River. They have dug away  
four feet of roots and clay to expose slanted slabs of sedimentary  
stone.

"Look at that megalith, it's got to weigh 40 tons," Mr. Osmanagic said  
eagerly, pointing to one of the roughly rectangular-shaped stones.  
"After so many thousands of years, it is amazing that they are still  
here."

Mr. Osmanagic, an amateur archaeologist, is convinced that he has  
discovered a huge ancient pyramid that will rewrite the history of  
Europe — not to mention that of Bosnia, a country suffering from war  
recriminations, political divisions and sunken pride. Anthropological  
genetics, he said, has proved that Bosnia is "the second oldest oasis  
of life in Europe," and the pyramid proves Bosnia is a source of  
civilization on the Continent.

"It's not just any pyramid," he said from beneath his flat-crowned  
Navajo hat, which has led the local press to liken him to Indiana  
Jones. "It's the biggest pyramid in the world."

Archaeologists and historians inside and outside Bosnia are appalled,  
insisting it is simply a peculiarly symmetrical bit of geology. But  
pyramid fever is spreading through the country. Largely uncritical  
television and newspaper reports have made the photogenic Mr. Osmanagic  
a national celebrity, and volunteers are flocking to Visoko hoping to  
help uncover the Pyramid of the Sun, a prehistoric edifice that will  
redeem the country by giving it a glorious and important past. "After  
all the blood and mass graves, this gives people something positive to  
talk about," said Zlatko Bekbic, who came from the northeastern town of  
Tuzla to see the supposed pyramid.

Asim Islamovic, 67, climbs the steep and slippery hill daily to dig  
with his toothless wife and middle-aged daughter. He lost a leg during  
the war that began in 1992, after the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina  
broke away from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia. The horrors that followed  
introduced the world to the term "ethnic cleansing."

"We are changing the image of the whole country," Mr. Islamovic said.  
"We're showing Bosnia in a good way."

But not everyone is elated. "This isn't a pyramid, it's a bad circus,"  
said Zilka Kujundzic-Vejzagic, a specialist in prehistoric archaeology  
at the National Museum in Sarajevo. She is one of 21 experts who  
published an open letter in Bosnian newspapers in April denouncing Mr.  
Osmanagic's project as bad science and manipulative sociology.

She scoffs at his suggestion that the pyramid is "probably older than  
the last ice age," saying no humans were even building simple huts  
then. There is no evidence, she said, that there was ever a  
civilization in the region organized enough to build such a massive  
monument. "If there had been a people who could make something like  
that, we would have found artifacts around it," she said.

Archaeologists in Bosnia have found little more than flint tools from  
the end of the last ice age and only simple Neolithic settlements that  
appeared thousands of years after that. The country's most substantial  
ancient monument is a modest stone city in southern Bosnia built during  
the third century B.C. by the Illyrians. The Egyptians are believed to  
have built their pyramids around 3,000 B.C., but even the biggest of  
them is dwarfed by Mr. Osmanagic's hill, which is 700 feet high.

Ms. Kujundzic-Vejzagic and her peers say that the symmetrical hill that  
Mr. Osmanagic has seized on was formed when an ancient lake bed buckled  
from tectonic movement of the earth's crust millions of years ago. As  
Africa pushed into Europe, geologists say, the flat lake bed broke into  
shards that were lifted up like pieces of ice at the colliding edge of  
an ice floe, creating flat-sided hills.

But where archaeologists see geological principles, Mr. Osmanagic sees  
the grandeur of Bosnian prehistory in which his ancestors built not  
only the Pyramid of the Sun, but also at least two other giant  
monuments hidden under grass and trees, which he has named the Pyramids  
of the Moon and Dragon. These terrestrial lumps, he said, form a  
triangle.

"Nature could not have created three identical hills in this pattern,"  
he said with matter-of-fact confidence. He tells the daily stream of  
visitors to his dig that at certain times of year, the shadow of the  
Pyramid of the Sun moves across the valley and covers the Pyramid of  
the Moon, "symbolizing that the reign of the sun is over and that of  
the moon is beginning."

His fans, mostly Bosnian Muslims like himself, include Sulejman Tihic,  
that group's representative in the country's dysfunctional three-party  
presidency that includes a Serb and a Croat. While Mr. Osmanagic  
insists he has broader support, he has little argument with the notion  
that nationalist pride plays a role in what is happening in Visoko.

"Once you show that you respect your past, people respect you more," he  
said in slightly accented English, as the pickaxes flew atop his  
pyramid. "The Bosnian brain is going to excavate this site and show  
results to the international community."

Visoko, a stronghold of the Bosnian nationalist party, was a major base  
of the Bosnian Army during the war. The bullet-riddled shell of a  
bombed-out Serbian house on the south flank of the pyramid-shaped hill  
attests to the religious tensions that still percolate here.

Nor is it just any hill that Mr. Osmanagic has identified as a  
prehistoric pyramid. The flat top is the site of a medieval castle that  
belonged to a 14th-century Christian king, Stefan Tvrtko I, who was  
buried in a church in the valley below.

Croats identify more with the king and his castle than do Bosnian  
Muslims, for whom the site is a subtle reminder of Serbian wartime  
propaganda that claimed there was no such thing as the Bosnian people,  
arguing that Bosnians were nothing more than Serbs and Croats who  
switched religions under Turkish occupation hundreds of years ago.

Mr. Osmanagic, 45, studied economics and politics in Sarajevo before  
moving to Croatia to work in the import and export trade. He left for  
the United States with his wife and son when the war broke out, and he  
now owns a metal shop in Houston that makes everything from stainless  
steel sinks to small copper pyramids that he sells as a novelty item  
for $40 each — a line that preceded his venture to the Visoko hill.

His true interest, he says, has long been in "the real history of  
civilization," and over the past 15 years, he repeatedly traveled to  
Central America to visit the pre-Columbian pyramids there. He wrote a  
dissertation on Mayan monuments for a doctorate degree at the  
University of Sarajevo that was published in English. It is full of  
new-age interpretations of what he saw in the Mayan pyramids. Several  
other books in his native language have also been published.

While promoting his books in Sarajevo last year, he answered an  
invitation from the director of the Visoko Historic Heritage Museum to  
visit the medieval ruins and, he said, quickly recognized the  
symmetrical hill they sat upon as a pyramid.

Every flat surface, every straight line only confirms his hypothesis.  
He sees four clearly delineated sides to the Visoko hill, corresponding  
to the cardinal points. "That was enough to convince me that we are  
talking about pyramids here," he said, standing on the gentler slope of  
the hill's west side, the "ceremonial causeway."

Radar analysis, he said, has found "straight hallways" inside the hill  
that intersect at 90-degree angles. Thermal analysis indicates that the  
hill dissipates heat more quickly than those around it, he said, as  
would a pyramid with tunnels inside.

In April, he instructed teams of volunteers to start digging on the  
slope above the town. They soon hit flat stones, and the mood grew  
feverish. "When they uncovered the first stone blocks, they were  
hopping like kids," Mr. Osmanagic said.

The authorities have granted him five years to excavate the site, and  
he has raised thousands of dollars from the local government and  
businesses to finance the work. He is trying to get the national  
government to put the project in its budget next year.

The genius of Mr. Osmanagic's discovery may turn out to be that it is  
difficult to disprove without a large and costly excavation, allowing  
an enduring and alluring mythology to grow up around the hill.

A hotel in Visoko has renamed itself the Pyramid Motel, and merchants  
are doing a brisk business selling miniature Mayan-style pyramids in  
the shape of the one that Mr. Osmanagic has convinced people lies  
beneath the wooded slopes.

"You're proof that something has started to move in a positive way,"  
one shop owner, Senar Laletovic, told a visiting reporter. "That alone  
is interesting."