Forty-five years ago, scientists stumbled upon a four-thousand-year-old cromlech in a schoolyard in Lower Escher.
One of the oldest religious buildings in the republic is difficult to find in the thickets of weeds, Sputnik correspondent Vladimir Begunov visited the Esher cromlech.
Weapons and jewelry at the school site
The ancient megalith is located in the courtyard of a school in Nizhnyaya Eshera that has been inactive since the Georgian-Abkhaz war. Finding it, not knowing the exact location, can only be at random, wandering from one side to the other of the destroyed school building, and then suddenly go out into an overgrown clearing, where among the grass are visible stones standing in a circle.
“It was investigated in 1969 by archaeologist Georgy Shamba, I was then on this expedition,” says Igor Tsvinaria, head of the department of archeology at AbIGI. “We dug two cromlechs, each made up of four circles of stones. The western one is completely preserved, and the eastern one is dilapidated.
In the book "Escher Cromlechs" Georgy Shamba writes that the local history teacher informed the scientists about the find. He said that during work in the school garden, unusually placed rows of stones were discovered along with ancient objects and bones. Archaeologists arrived and began to excavate the ancient sanctuary; they had to remove a meter layer of soil. The finds amazed - more than five hundred objects: ceramics, daggers, arrowheads, pins, pendants, buckles, beads, decorated with semi-precious stones, as well as many human bones.
According to archaeologists, stones for the cromlechs were delivered from a limestone quarry five kilometers away. The distance between the circles of stones was covered with pebbles, which were brought from the seashore, also from afar.
Cromlechs appeared about four thousand years ago. For two millennia they acted as ritual objects, and were abandoned only with the arrival of the Romans here at the beginning of our era.
Promotional video:
Escher cromlech during the Soviet period
Death by lightning
To understand how cromlech acted, you need to say a little about the ancient cult that arose at the dawn of mankind. In science, it is called animism. This is faith in spirits. Spirits, according to the ideas of people of that time, were the souls of people, both living and dead, animals, objects and natural phenomena. They were divided into bad and good. Sacrifices were offered to the wicked to appease them. Subsequently, shamanism was born on the basis of animism - the belief that a person with the highest knowledge can command spirits. Among the spirits, two were placed above others: the spirit of the stone and the spirit of the sun. The spirit of the stone, according to ancient people, possessed sacred knowledge, because the stone is eternal and strong, and the spirit of the sun ruled over the world. Accordingly, temples were made of stone in the shape of the sun. Their construction is described in one of the oldest books of mankind "Avesta". Burials were made in the center of the cromlech. Scientists believe that not everyone was buried there, mostly soldiers. Those who died from lightning were buried with special honors, it was considered a divine death.
General plan of the cromlechs from the book by Georgy Shamba "Escher cromlechs"
Secondary burial ceremony
Secondary burial was practiced in Abkhazia. It is also mentioned by Apollo of Rhodes, who gave the world the myth of the Argonauts. The body of a dead person was wrapped in the skin of an animal and hung from a tree in a sacred grove. When it decomposed, the bones were transferred to a cromlech, dolmen, or cave. For some reason, not all, during the excavations almost no ribs and vertebrae were found. According to the beliefs of that time, the spirit of a person could not completely leave the body while there was flesh on the bones. The bones were folded into cromlechs, covered with pebbles and covered with limestone slabs. This rite has been performed in the Escher cromlech for nearly twenty centuries. Perhaps there were priests with the cromlech who followed the ritual.
Carnelian beads found during excavations of Escher cromlechs
Georgy Shamba wrote that the ceramic dishes found in the Escher cromlech were clearly of a ritual nature, because they were a miniature copy of the real one: five-centimeter mugs and thirty-centimeter jugs.
“This is a pre-Scythian construction of the Bronze Age,” says Igor Tsvinaria. - What can be seen in Esher is a late form of cromlech, the early one I dug in Otkhara, under a six-meter mound. There, in contrast to Eshera, there is a whole megalithic complex with a dolmen in the middle and half-crumbs around.
According to Igor Tsvinarii, there may still be other cromlechs in Abkhazia that have not yet been found. In general, these structures are found all over the world.
Now Escher cromlechs are heavily overgrown with grass, they are rarely visited. Fresh photographs can be found only in the blogs of tourists who are geared towards mysticism. They specially come here to, like their distant ancestors, touch something mysterious, beyond the physical world.