Pagan shrine untouched for 2,000 years found in Croatia

They believe they are the first people to have set foot in it since it was sealed up as Rome’s legions marched across Europe.

The dramatic discovery was made deep inside a cave at Spila, near the village of Nakovana on the Peljesac Peninsula in southern Dalmatia, about 100 km (60 miles) northwest of the Adriatic city of Dubrovnik.

Pottery and a huge phallic stalagmite in the cave indicate that it was used as a shrine.

“We believe that the centre of the cave served as an altar for some pagan ritual, probably linked to fertility or potency,” Dr Staso Forenbaher of the Croatian Institute for Anthropological Research said.

“To our knowledge, this is the only Illyrian sanctuary ever found,” he added.

The Illyrians inhabited the western Balkans before the Romans conquered the region and were assimilated by migrating Slavic tribes in the early Middle Ages. Albanians are their only modern descendants.

Forenbaher and Dr Timothy Kaiser of the Royal Ontario Museum discovered deeper channels in the Spila cave almost by accident, during excavations at the entrance in August, 1999. They returned a year later to lead the project.

The cave contains several layers of archaeological material dating from the early Neolithic era, 6,000 years BC. The most valuable findings were hidden behind a mass of stones and earth deep inside.

Forenbaher said he believed the entrance might have been sealed on purpose, at some point during the first century BC at the time of the Roman conquest, possibly to prevent the sanctity of the site from being broken.

“It looked completely intact. The surface was crusty, and there was no evidence whatsoever that any human or animal had walked there for centuries,” said Forenbaher.

The fact that the shrine has been completely untouched for two millennia makes its significance even greater.

“Hopefully, this will give us a chance to try to reconstruct what had been going on there,” Forenbaher said.

As the team went into the cave, a corridor 50 metres (164 feet) in length and tall enough for a person to stand up in, opened up roughly in the middle of a circular area about 10 metres (32 feet) in diameter.

In the middle of this stood a 60-CM (two-feet) tall red and white stalagmite in the form of a phallus. The team believe it played a central role in whatever rituals went on in the cave when it was used as a shrine.

“We dug around and under the stalagmite and found that it had not grown there naturally. It had to be brought in from some place else — perhaps even from the cave itself — to be installed there by humans,” Forenbaher said.

Scattered around were hundreds of pieces of Hellenistic pottery, mostly plates and chalices, some of them bearing inscriptions in ancient Greek and Latin.

Their function and position around the phallus indicate they were used in some sort of a ritual that included feasting, drinking and probably making offerings to pagan gods.

Most pieces seem to have originated from Magna Graecia –Greek colonies in southern Italy — and from Greek settlements in the southern Dalmatian islands of Korcula (Korcyra Nigra), Hvar (Pharos) and Vis (Issa).

The team dug out about three tonnes of material from the cave, taking everything they could find to the Dubrovnik Archaeology Museum for further research, Forenbaher said.

They also found containers with what looked like remains of food that will be sent to Britain to be analysed, while radioactive carbon dating will be done in Croatia.

More than 100 kg (20 lb) of collected pottery will be sorted out and put together by local experts.

“We expect first reports to come out within a year, and the whole project to take three years,” Forenbaher said.