For thousands of years snake sentries, hewn out into the rocks have been standing guard over secrets hidden away behind an impenetrable forest. Faithful to their heathen gods, they watch over an abandoned sanctuary and guard the secrets of a lost civilization.

On 1 June the so-called snake city near Surnitsa village in the region of Haskovo revealed some of its mysteries for the first time, mysteries encoded deep in the bowels of the Earth. On that day a group of journalists, headed by Paulina Mihova travelled to the Eagle Rocks cult complex with the intention of filming it. But as fate would have it the three lost their way deep in the forest.

“We reached an area we couldn’t cross,” says Paulina Mihova. “I looked up at the rocks and started wondering what those niches near the topwere. I knew that if there were niches there must be a sanctuary there. And while I was peering up at them, several water snakes crawled around my ankles – well, there was a river nearby. We decided to use a drone to take pictures and on the monitor, saw the first snake heads hacked into the rock. The complex is a semi-circle of roughly 800-900 meters. It is located in a locality known as Dikilitash near Surnitsavillage. It is close to the Eagle Rocks and the sacred prehistoric complex in the village of Nochevo.”

From a bird’s eye view, the snake heads, human profiles, stairs, niches, a parallelepiped-shaped formation, a cave are all clearly discernible. Prof. Ana Radouncheva, archaeologist, member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology and researcher of the ancient sanctuaries in the Eastern Rhodopes tries to unravel their secret:

“This is not a town, it is a chain of rocks where there are figures of snakes or combinations of a human body with a snake head,” she says. “There are more such figures here than there are anywhere else and they are the latest discovery, part of the Rhodope system of prehistoric sanctuaries.”

Prof. Ana RadouNcheva says there are more than 250 cult complexes like this one scattered across the Rhodope Mountain. She is quite certain that the newly discovered snake figures were hewn into the rock by humans somewhere around the 8^th millennium BC. And adds that the people who created the sanctuary near Surnitsa belonged to an advanced society, which mysteriously disappeared around the 4^th millennium. And though there were rudiments of secular governance, still it was the high priests that wielded the supreme power. Evidence of this are the steps hacked out into the rock, leading up to the sky. It was at the summit that the spiritual leaders would stand.

“The snake is a multifaceted figure in the spiritual culture of prehistory,” the archaeologist explains. “They may play the role of sentries, watching over the bones of the sacrificial animals, or be a “motor of time”. Snakes are also seen as the figure mediating between man and the gods in ancient cults, with the worship taking place in the rock sanctuaries, especially at the close of the copper-stone age when the institution of high priests came into being.”

An enormous snake figure with a human body and a human mask hanging from the neck was discovered in the Rhodope sanctuary Belintash, Prof. Radouncheva adds.

The snake sanctuary will be a place conspiracy theorists will be able to hinge their theories on – theories of energy fields and mysterious forces at play – for a while longer. But in the autumn, when the trees have shed their leaves and the mysterious ancient complex is in plain view, archaeologists will be able to start their work. That is, if the money needed is raised, of course.

English version: Milena Daynova