30th June 2012
Other news from Bulgaria this month focused on skeletons and vampires and would have kept the likes of Van Helsing in excellent spirits. On the one hand, you have part of the head and bones of St John the Baptist, on the other, “vampires” with stakes through their hearts.
The bones purported to belong to St John had been found a couple of years ago, but the Bulgarian archaeologists who had evidence to link them to the cousin of Jesus, were scorned for their assumptions... until now. Carbon dating and other tests by Oxford University archaeologists have confirmed that they date back to the first decades of the Christian era: around the time Herod Antipas would have ordered St John’s beheading at the bequest of Salomé. They are also likely to belong to a man from the Middle Eastern region. The bones had been found in a reliquary in the 5th Century monastery on Sveti Ivan Island, close to an urn with the saint’s name and traditional birth date etched on it.
Meanwhile, archaeologists excavating a monastery near Sozopol, by the Black Sea have discovered 800-year-old skeletons with stakes through their chests. The burial sites had all the markings of ritual burials performed in order to prevent the men from turning into vampires. The skeletons caused such a stir, that the National Museum in Sofia has prepared specially designed glass coffins so that the public may visit them. It is thought that you would have had to be pretty bad to have a stake hammered through your heart, possibly after you were already dead, but I dread to think what constituted bad in those days. Perhaps they were just a couple of guys with a bad sense of timing, who tought that it would be a good idea to organise the first Gay Pride. Whoever they were: may they rest in peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment