Irna Wrote:
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> Well, of course the Miocene lake had totally
> disappeared long before any man ever appeared in
> Bosnia - or anywhere else :-).

Sure, that's why I'm sure the story has been invented, probably it's quite modern.


> But that doesn't
> mean that you couldn't have a little lake or pond
> in a valley, behind a natural barrier, in more
> recent times, and it's possible that people,
> during antiquity or medieval times, made a ditch
> to drain the water.

There is much more than that (I'll tell you in a second), but it's not the story I was referring too. For that one, my best hypothesis is the same type of good imagination which gave birth to two more famous stories from here that everybody knows, are very romantic-dramatic, stick in the mind (so they become tradition), and are completely apocriphous ;-)

There IS a ditch around the ancient core of Bihac and it WAS made in medieval times for defense purposes. Although the most ancient written document (not so ancient in absolute terms, it's from 1260) already mentions and "island" as the site of the city, centuries before that ditch was made.

The fascinating point is that we actually have no idea what is under our feet, e.g. what was there up to that 1260. At least on the very site of the city, since a few kilometers up the Una abundant traces of Illyrian (Iapodes) settlements have been found. It's a bit weird that the heart of the valley, the central point, is not documented for a couple of thousand years... But probably we will never know.

Not only because, well, who would now dig up the present-day city just to have a look. Whatever is here, probably is under at least six meters of earth/mud/sediments, like in Ripac, 10 km. up the valley, when a famous palafittes site has been excavated: already in Austro-Hungarian times, and then a few decades ago by a lady archeologist of whom I am honoured to be friend, Ms Branka Raunig, who is a rather famous author of studies on the Iapodes.

The Una is a wild river, and a very peculiar lady :-) , sedimenting calcareous barriers at a rather high rate, which means that the scenario keeps changing during the centuries: where there was land, there is water, where there was water, there is land. In other words, calcareous sediments build up on every natural (or not natural) obstacle in the water, creating natural dams, rapids, cascades, then the water often finds other passages and floods what was surface. It's incredible, breathtakingly beautiful, and very puzzling if you want to keep trace of what happened centuries - or millennia ago.

(Hmm, perhaps the moderators will want to shif this post to a new theme, since I'm getting rather far from Visoko and the "pyramids", but since there's been so much discussion about nature - manmade, well, to be sincere, Visoko is easy and clear, as compared to what Mother Nature can do with "sedra", the sedimentary calcareous rock that Una creates here)

It's a valley full of misteries and lost cities, although hardly anything as old as 12.000 or 27.000 years ago ;-)

Personally, I'm satisfied with the thrill of wondering about the last three millennia, there's quite a lot to find out there. More on the Iapodes, to say nothing of the whole Roman era (and we do know this area WAS conquered and colonized by Rome, some traces have been found, a villa floor here, fragments of a Neptune temple there...). Nearly everything of centuries of earlier and later medieval historical monuments and documents has gone, disappeared in war after war and the total upheaval and change of civilization that took place with the Ottoman conquest, and here in the Bosnian Krajina (the northwest of today's Bosnia) that conquest took nearly all the XVI century ( and good part of the one before).

Archeologists and historians together could be busy here for centuries, if they wanted to go hunting for all the different "layers" of lost peoples and their habitats... It's so endlessly fascinating that I could go on talking about that for hours - that's why I'll stop now before becoming boring ;-)

Anyway, the lake-and-dam "legend" rests on the way the Bihac pocket looks, and that is not a small lake or pond, it's a huge, impressive, beautiful bowl taking the whole valley, I'd say about 20 km lenght and perhaps half as wide. There are plateaus rising on both sides of the Una, with the flooding plain on the bottom, and a higher level of elevation above the plateaus, the massif of Pljesevica to the south (that's already mountain, goes up to 1600, and it's very long in extension, about 100 km) and the Grmec to the south, that is a little lower, but some quite impressive hills. Oh, sure, we have pyramids too :-))) The two Ljutoc tops, bigger and smaller, towards the east, and a couple more above Jezerski, to the west.

All very dramatic to see. I think the prehistoric lake is quite evident to discern. I have long planned to take some photos (though I do not have the proper equipment or skills to do it justice, with a wide-angle panorama), if I manage to do it and put them online I'll ask you for an opinion.

> maybe you shoud contact
> geolog-mrak at , he's a local geologist, living I
> think in Tuzla.

Another great lady I'm honored to be friends with is a geologist of international level, actually she has the chair of geology at Sarajevo university: I have long planned to get into the matter with her, but I got thrilled at seeing your map :-)


> Yes, that's part of Osmanagic's theory, see for
> instance at the end of his book about the "pyramid
> of Sun", there is a text wrote by Jovo Jovanovic
> about "alke", iron-rings ; and the Foundation even
> had, at a time, a "sub-committee for iron-rings"

Yes, I think this is what I was referring too, I've come across it.


> (managed by Jovanovic) in the "committee for
> archaeology". Their claim is that iron-rings could
> be found high in the mountains everywhere in
> Bosnia (but curiously not one can be found
> nowadays, they have all disappeared...), and that
> these iron-rings were used by an old civilisation
> during the Flood to tight their boats...

This story caught my eye because I heard it here in Bihac, that was already some years ago, from some friend of mine. When he told me, he was referring to it as if he had seen it himself (up the Pljesevica mountain that I just mentioned), but I'm not really sure. As I said, the massif is very extended, and I've been just in a few places. Also, alas, it is mined in several parts, and cut by the border between Bosnia and Croatia.

I know the story has been on tv too (long before Osmanagic and his "pyramids"), but I have no more data.

Connecting to the above story about the lake, it doesn't make much sense, if the rings were to be really up the mountain: it raises much higher than the plateau that in turn appers to delimit an area that might have been filled with water (though here I'm really playing guess games, I have no idea what the level of water could have been, I just have the picture of the valley clear in my mind's eyes). Even if we were not talking of an age long before any human presence, boats would have been tied much lower.

All in all, it seems more of a bunch of nice fairy tales ;-) Or good for fantasy novels. But the lake-shape is for real, and I love to watch it every day.

> The iron-rings are also the hobby of a man who has
> developped really fancy theories years before
> Osmanagic, Rudolf Bosnjak

As I said, there are many stories around... There is something very romantic-imaginative-mystical in the air here :-) The scenario is inspiring, it does breath mystery at every step... I love the stories, in a way they are being vitcims of some violence too, when wrenched from the misty, dreamy twilight zone they belong to, to bu pushed on the stage masquerading as "science", "evidence" and so on.

Ahem, sorry for making a long story of it, but perhaps it's apparent that I'm totally in love with this country (the nature and the people, the people and the nature).

Yet, I cannot avoid to add one more thing, to point out that cultural heritage has much more to defend itself from than Osmanagic alone: the palafittes I quoted, in Ripac, are today buried under a private weekend house. And THAT is no mystery. If you go to the website of the Commission for National Monuments you will find it straight away - Ripac, on the list of seriously endangered national monuments, because of illegal building.

How comes? Well, the site was never taken care of, they just reburied it (yes, it was difficult to keep, Branka told me at a certain point it tended to flood). Then some private guy bought it and built a house on it. Illegal, even if there were no three-thousand year old archeologic remnants under it, since you are not supposed to build closer than fifty meters from the water. But here, the rule is, who has moey does their will (as I was told when flamed recently quoting just that house). I personally took the Museum's director and the director of the cantonal institute for cultural heritage there, they nearly fainted, but a year and a half later the only change I see is that the whole island, since it's an island, has received new walled banks. Horrid too see, right in the middle of a several hundred-metre wide natural barrier front, forming the famous Ripac waterfalls.

Yeah, I adore Bosnia, and yes, it'll be a long, long battle still.