I happened to be born on a part of earth that is inhabited for thousands of years. I was raised in familiarity with ancient ruins and remains of a long gone civilization and I have always thought that it was only natural. It took me a while to realize that it is not exactly common to live on an area that is constantly populated for millenniums. After all, when the human race started to create villages and to give up the nomadic way of living, the population of the planet was less than the population of a small modern city! And yet those people, scattered all over the globe, were building homes, creating art and loved their Gods in the same places that some of us, still do.
Have you ever stood on a archeological site, under the moonlight, trying to imagine what it looked like in the past and how would have been to live there when all of this were brand new? I do that sometimes, usually on a Minoan settlement close to my house and every time it gives me a very comforting and reassuring feeling, kind of a "we are here for the long run" feeling, that gives to our existence a much deeper sense. I am not sure that you understand what I am talking about, but I felt the same thing when I stumbled across the megalithic universe of Évora which is what I was started to write about in the first place!
The standing rock of the picture above is known as the menhir of Almendres and it is the lonely introduction to the Cromlech of the Almendres, a complex of almost 100 megalithic structures that lies a couple of km further. And if one menhir is impressive, a whole bunch of them settled in a semi-ellipsoidal formation can be mind-blowing!
The locals calls them "pedras talhas" and they were found in the sixties, fallen on the ground. Multiannual archeological research placed the monument somewhere between the 6th and 4th millennia BC and restored the stones to their original places (or ,at least, the places they believed to be the original ones).
The amazing thing is that after so many years of studying them, the archeologists are unable to tell, with certainty, what was the use of this structures. There is strong evidence that we are talking about a sacred place and apparently there is a connection with the movement of the moon and the sun but no one can say something more specific.
I am trying to imagine those people struggling to put all this together, with minimum tools and obviously a lot of manual labor and I can only think that they considered it mostly important. They even carved them, although you can hardly see the designs anymore and two stones look like people (I think you can tell which ones from the pictures), who knows why!
In any case if you ever visit Portugal and you are at Évora, don't miss it. It is only a 30' drive from the town and it might open a small crack on your solid timeline :)
This is a 'Showcase Sunday' post, originally written in 2019. If you are not familiar with the #showcasesunday, it is an idea of
@nonameslefttouse meant to revive old posts. I didn't have many followers back then so I guess that most of you haven't read it before :)
You may find the original post here.