In Central Europe, their "Stonehenge" appeared almost three thousand years earlier than in the British Isles. Already in the 5th millennium BC, large ceremonial centers appeared here.
These wooden buildings are among the oldest monuments of monumental architecture. The ancient originals have long since decayed and leveled to the ground, but archaeologists continue to find traces of them. What were these strange ring structures intended for? Were they observatories, temples, altars, or marketplaces?
One of the earliest buildings of this kind was erected in Lower Austria, in the town of Schletz, about 6800 years ago. The first thing that met a person who came here was a huge moat, encircling the building. Several narrow walkways led across it. Having overcome the moat, the visitor was greeted by a new barrier - a palisade, which fenced off the interior space.
Its height reached 2-3 meters. It was impossible to look behind its continuous ring - the pillars were so tightly fitted to each other. The central part of the building - the "holy of holies" - remained inaccessible to prying eyes, which brought a kind of mystery into the everyday landscape.
In the federal state of Lower Austria, about forty such buildings have been opened. Sometimes they are surrounded by not one, but two palisades, not one, but several ditches that encircle a circular space with a diameter of 40 to 160 meters.
In recent decades, these monumental structures have been found throughout Central Europe: in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, Bavaria and Saxony. There are already about three and a half hundred of them. What was going on inside them? Scientists cannot yet accurately answer this question.
According to one hypothesis, these structures were a huge calendar that marked the most important events of the year - a kind of observatory that helped to observe the starry sky. In some buildings, the gates were oriented so that the sun looked into them exactly on December 21, the day of the winter solstice. Other gates marked, for example, the appearance of the Pleiades and, therefore, the arrival of spring - the time of sowing.
The most famous of these buildings is located on the territory of the former GDR, in the town of Gosek. Today it is the oldest in Europe. The time of its construction dates back to about 5000-4900 BC.
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Its diameter reached 75 meters. It was a huge structure, clearly visible from afar. It was equipped with three gates and a double ring of palisade. Archaeologists and astronomers have proven that two gates indicated the location of sunrise and sunset on the winter solstice at the beginning of the 5th millennium BC.
Circle in Goseck
Scientists believe that on this day, the tribal nobility gathered inside the fence - VIPs of the Stone Age. A palisade separated them from the rank and file of the tribe. At the expected hour, the sun was shown in the gateway - a luminary that turned winter into summer, night into day, darkness into light, death into life. Its first rays cut through the rest of the sanctuary like lightning. In the opening of other gates, it flashed when, having accomplished its feat, it again hid in the darkness. At midnight, the moon looked into the opening of the third gate.
In that ancient century, the solar observatory was almost as important to humans as computer technology was to our contemporaries. An important revolution took place in the economic system. People abandoned hunting and gathering and began to engage in agriculture and cattle breeding, that is, they tamed nature, curbed it, learned its temper, its cyclical changes.
At that time, a very favorable environment for farming was created in Central Europe. The average temperature was about two degrees higher than it is now. The Observatory at Goseck was located on the outskirts of Germany's most fertile region, its granary, the Magdeburg Plain.
Obviously, this was also known to the people of that time. On the territory of the former GDR, between Halle and Leipzig, archaeologists have repeatedly found traces of human settlements dating back to VI-V millennia BC.
However, it would be wrong to reduce the purpose of all these buildings to a single purpose. Surely they also played an important social role, were a meeting place for all members of the tribe - a kind of forum for people of the Stone Age - played the same role as the market square in the Middle Ages.
The same Gosek, according to the German archaeologist François Berthemes, who led the excavations here, was not only an observatory and a sacred place, but also a market, a place of execution and burial, as well as a fortress where members of the tribe took refuge in the event of an enemy attack: “If it were only about observing the sky, two pegs and a stone that served as a sight would be enough."
Such structures, apparently, were the main attraction of all large settlements of that time, their hallmark; they demonstrated the power and wealth of the community, as later did the genuine temple complexes - the sanctuaries of antiquity, cathedrals and mosques of the Middle Ages.
They were located in the middle of the settlement.
In some communities there were even two ring "temples" - one smaller, the other, a few hundred meters from it, more. So in the Middle Ages, next to a modest church, over time, a handsome cathedral grew.
Apparently, these Neolithic buildings should really be called sanctuaries without any quotation marks. The invisible gods were under the protection of the picket fence - there were no traces of human habitation, no garbage left by them, no ruins of dwellings on the fenced area. A certain cult was set off here, the meaning of which is still incomprehensible to scientists.
Perhaps the inhabitants of Central Europe professed the same religion at the end of the Neolithic. Can we now reconstruct their beliefs based on individual artifacts known to us? In almost all of the ditches, broken clay figurines, the so-called idols, were found. Probably, they were intermediaries between the real, ordinary world and the incomprehensible otherworldly.
There are also statuettes depicting women with lush hips - probably symbols of fertility. Inside the sanctuaries, behind the palisade, there were probably some festivities, solemn ceremonies were held, for example, prayers were offered here, marriage unions were made, mourned for the dead, and initiation rites for young men were performed. At the end of the ceremony, a “new man” emerged from behind the fence - a new full member of the tribe.
Around 4500 BC, Stone Age sanctuaries become empty - just a few centuries after the first such structures appeared. In the neighboring villages, everyday life still flows, but the ditches are diligently filling up as if they did not exist.
What is it? Did they go out of style all at once? The culture of the megalith builders triumphs in Europe. Menhirs (lonely standing stones up to 20 meters high), dolmens (tombs, similar to gates, made of huge stone slabs), cromlechs (circles of separate vertically placed stones) are erected.
The rest was completed by erosion and the everyday work of plowmen, who annually dug up land in areas that were once considered sacred. By the time Stonehenge was built, Stone Age wooden temples were long forgotten.
"And yet, perhaps it was in Central Europe that monuments were erected that served as a model for the builders of Stonehenge?" - such a question, no, no, and the researchers will ask themselves. This story is still waiting to be continued.
