A Guest Post from Mira Kolar-Brown
This week we’re happy to welcome Mira Kolar-Brown, the author of the Simon Grant Mystery Series.
Born in what used to be called Yugoslavia, Mira’s work brought her to the UK in 1977 – and she’s called the place home ever since.
Hiding the Elephant and Lock Up your Daughters are the first two books in her Simon Grant Mystery series. Both are available on Kindle. The third, For the Love of Honey, is in the works.
Mira lives near Manchester and has two grown-up daughters.
Leighton - Monday
Visoko is a small town located at the center of Bosnia.
Throughout the turbulent history of the country, Visoko’s only claim to fame had been the coronation of the Bosnian king Tvrtko Kotromanic in the 14th century.
After that, nothing of note in any shape or form.
Until 2005, that is, when the shape turned up in the unlikely form of not just one but three enormous pyramids.
Dr. Semir Osmanagic, a native of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a Houston based millionaire, detected the curiously regular shape of three out of many hills surrounding Visoko.
His curiosity was piqued, his explorer’s juices started flowing.
Now, in my humble status of a very ordinary person, I suspect that the ability and drive to turn an idle thought into a major international project must have something to do with being a millionaire. My own curiosity leads me to waste hours upon hours on the Internet searching for answers to whimsical questions.
Osmanagic simply secured a permit to remove thousands upon thousands of tons of top soil to see what’s underneath.
What he found were concrete slabs…
Or, so he said.
He claimed he'd discovered the first European pyramids and that they were built some 12,000 ago in the late Upper Palaeolithic era.
His claims, predictably, were met with suspicion, incredulity, ridicule and downright hostility in some quarters. Semir persevered.
Over time, dedicated teams and the growing army of volunteers,
have dug up long tunnels
and paved paths.
All that in spite of the Bosnian government’s reluctance to issue the required permits or offer any sort of support.
At one point the Minister for Heritage turned up in person ordering the Project to close down because of the risks for the neighbouring mediaeval historical sites.
The established archaeology experts kept away too. That came as a surprise to me. I wouldn’t expect anyone to endorse a project like that out of hand, but how did so many of them manage to curb that most wonderful of all human traits – curiosity?
For Semir and his project it was a case of beg, steal and borrow and that’s what he was doing until one by one they came, they looked, they tested and they succumbed. Some of them, anyhow.
Arguments against validity of the Bosnian Valley of Pyramids:
- Dr. Semir Osmanagic is not an archaeologist.
- Dr. Semir Osmanagic is an unashamed dreamer with self-confessed Druid-like beliefs.
- There is no evidence that anyone in the world was building anything bigger than a shack in the late Upper Palaeolithic.
- There are too few artefacts or articles in common use found in the excavations.
- The tunnels/corridors could have been dug up though the hill at a much later date.
Arguments in favour of the Bosnian Valley of Pyramids:
- About ten different artifacts have been discovered so far.
including forged glass
and a mould for casting metal.
- Electromagnetic and ultrasound tests indicate that the building work took place as long as 12,000 years ago
- Tests confirm that the building material used was, beyond any doubt, manufactured, not produced by nature.
- Quite independently from the work on the pyramids, a Bosnian writer found a great concentration of stone balls along The River Bosnia, the largest of them being 1.7 m high and 5.3 m in circumference. An Egyptian archaeologist confirmed that they were man-made and of a similar age as the pyramids. The presence of the Bosnian stone balls was only established after an earthquake in the late ’90 but similar objects are commonly found in some numbers in South America.
If anyone wants more information and detail, or wishes to join the project as a volunteer, please go here:
or watch Osmanagic’s video on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqYlHmS9hB0
Granted, whichever camp you’re in, there are still far more questions than answers. But it’s an incredibly intriguing, fascinating enterprise, very much worthy of attention.
The mystery to me is the noncommittal attitude of the Bosnian government.
They have spread responsibility for the project over five different departments, which makes it five times harder to obtain further permits and make way through the maze of red tape.
Bosnia’s economy is in tatters with high unemployment and low average income. A properly supported and promoted discovery of that magnitude, no matter what it turns out to be in the end, has a potential of bringing in tourists to the country as a whole, not just the area of Visoko.
Back in 1981 the first reporters from Medjugorje (http://www.medjugorje.org/medpage.htm) talked about a handful of modest houses in the village and not a single public toilet. Haven’t the Bosnian potentates learned from that phenomenon how much revenue there is to be had from miracles?
