Saturday, October 07, 2006

Saturday Trivia

Bosnians go mad for pyramids
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=960
"While today's Bosnian papers are dominated by results of yesterday's elections, many readers will be skimming through to check for news of the pyramids. Bosnians have gone pyramid crazy ever since an amateur historian, Semir Osmanagic, claimed to have discovered three of them outside the town of Visoko."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1887640,00.html
Good summary of the Bosnian pyramid situation: "In Bosnia's Valley of the Pyramids, only one man is king. Semir Osmanagic, new-age philosopher and amateur archaeologist, splits his time between Texas and Sarajevo, but these days is mostly to be found scraping away at a hillside 40 minutes north of the Bosnian capital.
It is here that he claims to have made the most extraordinary discovery of the millennium: Europe's only pyramids, dating back to the late Ice Age, exceeding in scale and perfection those of ancient Egypt or Latin America. . . . The experts strongly dispute his claims. Mr Osmanagic, 46, says they are jealous. And at Visoko, an army of amateurs is busy digging up the hillsides to uncover traces of man-made structures that the Houston Bosnian insists date from a prehistoric cycle of civilisation rich in its sophistication and washed away "in the flood".
The locals love it. Farmers are turning fields into car parks. Coach tours are arriving from all over Bosnia and beyond. Cafes, bars, and hotels are doing booming business in what was a severely depressed Muslim town on the frontline of a war that ended 11 years ago."
See the above page for the full story.

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