Nan Madol is an artificial archipelago with a total area of 79 hectares, consisting of 92 islands connected by a system of artificial canals. Also known as "Venice of the Pacific". Located near Temven Island, southeast of Ponape Island, part of the Caroline Islands, and until AD 1500. e. was the capital of the So Dehler dynasty, ruling at that time.
On the island of Ponape, lost in the Pacific Ocean, civilization developed and died long before the first European appeared there. During the era of great geographical discoveries, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and English sailors, returning from long voyages, told many incredible stories about the wonders of the Pacific islands.
Scientists, as a rule, considered these stories to be ordinary sailor tales and therefore did not believe the story of the Spanish captain Alvaro Saavedra, who in 1529 told about the amazing island of Ponape, lying between the Hawaiian archipelago and the Philippines. The captain claimed: the island has ruins of temples, palaces, incomprehensible large structures, stone embankments. According to him, the abandoned city vaguely resembled Venice.
For a long time geographers considered the mysterious city on Ponapa a legend until the island was visited by the Russian navigator Fyodor Petrovich Litke during his circumnavigation of the world in 1826-1829 on the Senyavin sloop. He first drew up maps of the island, described the mysterious ruins of Ponape and mapped the neighboring islands.
Ponape is a volcanic island with a diameter of only 15 kilometers, surrounded by a barrier reef. It is part of the Carolina Archipelago of Micronesia near the equator. The shores of the island have been severely destroyed by tropical typhoons, and in the center of it there are dense thickets. In the east of the island there is an artificial lagoon, and here the reef barrier was destroyed by human hands. Inside the shallow lagoon are the ruins of the ancient city of Nan Madol, located on more than a hundred small islets.
Promotional video:
Looking at the ruins, Litke was convinced that the inhabitants had long left the city, and only on the opposite side of the island, in primitive conditions, lived a handful of natives. Unfortunately, all information about Ponapa collected by Litke was lost in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society and was never fully published. In 1857, the ruins of Nan Madol were superficially surveyed by the American L. Gyulik, and a little later the Pole I. Kubari, who settled on the island, drew up the first detailed plan of the ruins.
In 1896, the Englishman F. Christian appeared on Ponap, an unceremonious and dishonest explorer. Guided by the plan of Kubari, he subjected the ruins of Nan Madol to a real robbery and himself almost died at the hands of local residents after he plundered several ancient tombs revered by the natives.
The most serious archaeological study of Nan Madol was undertaken in the late 19th - early 20th centuries by the German scientist Paul Hambruch, who established that all the islets inside the lagoon are of artificial origin!
Unknown builders brought basalt slabs from the north of the island, laid them in rows along and across, and if the blocks were of irregular shape, the gaps between them were filled with coral rubble. The tops of most of the platforms were flat, suitable for building structures.
During strong tides, the space between the platforms was flooded, and the town was covered with a network of canals, reminiscent of little Venice. Hambruch mapped ninety of these artificial islands. He also discovered artificial reservoirs, foundations of palaces and temple buildings.
In 1908, a book by Hambrukh was published, dedicated to the research of Nan Madol. In it, the scientist put forward the assumption that a religious and cult center of the Micronesians operated on Ponap for several centuries, where residents of other islands in Oceania made pilgrimages.
This is evidenced by the legends recorded by Hambrukh from the words of the aborigines. According to these legends, the island was once ruled by the prince Sau Deleur, whose name gradually became a title and meant the king-priest. There were fifteen such Sau Deleurs, and then the dynasty faded away. It is to this dynasty that the merit of the construction of stone buildings on artificial islands belongs.
The scientist determined the beginning of the construction of the sacred city around the 5th century AD. In 1958, this was confirmed by an examination conducted by researchers from the United States. A German archaeologist recorded the legend of the islanders about the main goddess of Nan Madol, the Nanunsunsan tortoise. A palace with a pool was built for her, and the goddess herself was decorated with mother of pearl. On holidays, the priests took her on a boat along the canals and shouted divinations on her behalf. Then the goddess was fried and solemnly eaten. The Americans in 1958 at the bottom of a swampy reservoir inside the temple found thousands of shells of such goddesses.
By 1914, Hambrukh and other researchers established that there were about eight hundred stone structures in Nan Madol, including the fortress walls and port buildings. The main temple was erected from megalithic blocks. Under this temple, a network of tunnels and canals was discovered through which people and boats could penetrate.
Archaeological discoveries on Ponap have given rise to many fantastic and incredible hypotheses. Some scientists claimed: the remains of the legendary Lemuria were found on the island; others saw in the Cyclopean stone buildings the fruits of the activities of the Inca colonizers who supposedly arrived on the island from Peru. It was also hypothesized that Ponape was an outpost of the Egyptian pharaohs in the Pacific Ocean.
American archaeologists were able to begin serious studies of Nan Madol only in 1958. From the stories of the natives, they learned that during the occupation, the Japanese were excavating in many parts of the island, finding something and taking it away. They talked about some metal objects, sculptures and sarcophagi. The Americans sent an official request to Tokyo, but the Japanese authorities replied that they did not know anything about it.
In 1977, a book was published by the Popean Luyelen, who lived in one of the villages in the north of the island, who bit by bit collected the preserved local legends about Nan Madol. The book came out in a scanty circulation and reached European scientists only in 2001.