On Lepenski Vir
Lepenski Vir, an important prehistoric village, is located on the stony terraces above the Danube River in the Iron Gates. The Iron Gates of the Danube is an ancient name for a gorge about 60 miles long cut by the river through the flanks of the Carpathian Mountains at the border of Serbia and Romania. Two national parks occupy the opposing banks of the canyon – in Serbia, the gorge is protected as Djerdap National Park; the Romanian side of the river is simply called Iron Gate National Park. The area is located about 250 kilometers to the northeast of Belgrade and accessed by the Iron Gates Highway, a modern road that leads to the Djerdap Park. The place is a popular tourist destination due to its interesting history, the ruins of Lepenski Vir, and the spectacular scenery where the mighty river slices through the mountains.
The Iron Gates gorge consists of four canyons, set apart from one another by deep ravines through which tributary rivers flow. Steep slopes rise over the river to green ribbons of oak, hackberry, walnut, and linden trees occupying shelves high above the Danube. Above the forests, summits of chalk-colored stone rise in bald ramparts. At the base of the mountains where the river flows, sheer cliffs loom over the swift river, flowing in some places in a narrow crevasse among the peaks. Huge scree slopes angle down to the river banks and, for many miles, there is scarcely enough level terrain in the gorge for a road running parallel to the Danube. Two thousand years ago, before the Romans chiseled their highway into the hillsides, the only reasonable way downstream was on the river – the canyons were too perpendicular and the massive tilted fields of boulders and limestone gravel were impassable. But the river was also perilous. The canyon bottom was white with cataracts and immense boulders with rapids foaming around them blocked the river’s course. Where the river is more placid and broader, towers of porphyry rise thousands feet over the Danube gorge; limestone karst formations riddled with caves ascend from the river’s banks up to form an angular, crumpled pedestal supporting the mountain monoliths. It’s wild, rugged, country, still mostly uninhabited, and formerly very difficult to traverse except by river. In the gorge, the Danube flows, more or less, from the northwest to the southeast, but the river is bent around stubborn pillars of rock, curving and looping through the canyons in immense meanders.
The gorge enters history about 100 AD. At that time, Roman legions marched along the Danube to invade the wealthy kingdoms of the Dacians. These people lived in a half-dozen city-states between the Black Sea and the Hyrcanian forest (the Black Forest in Germany). The Dacians were warlike and wealthy on the basis of gold mines in their territory. Emperor Trajan sent armies to conquer them, laboriously ascending the Danube gorges through the Gates of Iron. Roman troops hacked a road into the sheer cliffs and, then, built an enormous bridge at what is now Orsova in Romania. The bridge was erected between 20 colossal masonry piers, wooden decking spanning the spaces between the brick caissons filled with stone and gravel fill. The bridge was 3,724 feet long, a spectacular feat of engineering and the longest span in the ancient world. Roman legions marched across the bridge and fought Dacian armies arrayed against them. The Dacians were commanded by a war-lord, Decebalus – the name means “as strong as ten men.” Ultimately, Decebalus was defeated. In a final battle with the Romans, he fled the field of combat and committed suicide by slashing open his own throat. The Romans cut off his right hand and head and had the mummified body-parts sent back to Rome. As was the custom at the time, Trajan ordered that the skull and withered hand be hurled down the Gemonian Stairs, a steep concrete stairway whittled into the side of the Capitoline Hill. For 123 days, the Romans celebrated their defeat of the Dacians – 10,000 gladiators fought in the arena and 11,000 wild animals were slaughtered. Trajan’s column, raised in commemoration of the Emperor’s victories shows the bearded Decebalus, falling sideways under a tree, the Dacian ruler holding a curved knife against his jugular vein. A horse rears over him and another horse, bearing a clean-shaven Roman soldier, seems about to trample him under its hooves. This scene is on the column at spiral 22, panel b.
Decebalus is revered in Romania as a culture-hero to the modern people living in that country. (This is more than a little peculiar since the Romanians today are Slavs who invaded the area several hundred years after Trajan’s war and not actually descendants of the Dacians). For about 250 years, Romanian nationalists and freedom fighter have promoted as a pseudo-science the cult of Protochronism, sometimes, more simply “Dacianism”. This is a theory that the Dacians invented writing and are the mother culture to all later civilization in Europe and, indeed, other parts of the world. For instance, the Dacianists believe that the Vedic literature in India was written by Dacian invaders who were instrumental in founding one of the first cities in the world, Harappa in the Indus Valley. Harappa and its companion city, Mohenjo-Daro, date to 2600 BC. Indeed, some Dacianists argue that Japan was colonized by Dacian explorers and that the ancient Mayans as well as the Andes’ cultures were taught the arts of civilization by these people. Protochronism (Dacianism) was an article of faith in the regime Nicola Ceausescu, the last Communist ruler of Romania.
The bloody demise of Nicola Ceausescu didn’t mark the end of the Dacianist theory of world history. Soon enough the much-vaunted gold mines in Dacian territory played-out, but, much later, black gold was discovered in their homeland – that is, oil. A Romanian oligarch named Constantin Dragan promoted Dacianist ideology in the decades after Ceausescu’s execution. And, in honor of his hero, Dragan had artisans dynamite and chisel a tall spire of rock at the entry to the Iron Gates into a likeness of Decebalus. The colossal profile is 180 feet tall, carved around 1990, and marked with the legend Decebalus Rex – Dragan Fecit (“King Decebalus – made by Dragan”). Dragan tried to persuade the Serbians on the right-hand bank of the Danube (generally south) to carve an equally massive sculpture of Trajan. His scheme was to have the two adversaries glaring at one another for all time across the Danube gorge. But the Serbians were unimpressed by the towering stone figure of Decebalus and declined to create their own counterpart to that colossus. (Of course, no one has any idea what Decebalus really looked like – on the conical pinnacle of rock, he is carved with a luxuriant beard, curly hair, and a sort of pointed cap. From some angles, the huge head seems to suffer from nystagmus – that is, the glaring eyes on the colossus look slightly cross-eyed.)
As Yugoslavia modernized, the country demanded electricity for its lights and cities. The torrent of the Danube was an obvious source for hydro-electric power. Ultimately, two dams were built in the gorge. The first was Iron Gate I, construction completed around 1966. This dam raised the level of the Danube in the water that it impounded by about 35 meters. (Iron Gate II was completed in the early seventies.) While work on the dam was underway, the Yugoslavia Republican Commission for the Investigation and Protection of Cultural Monuments commenced an exhaustive surface survey of the Danube gorge – this was salvage archaeology intended to identify cultural features likely to be inundated under the lake impounded by the dam. Several noteworthy monuments were threatened by the rising water level. First, the remnants of Trajan’s huge bridge would be drowned under the lake waters. In particular, a panel carved into a towering river-side cliff, the so-called Tabula Trajan, was threatened. This is a Latin inscription celebrating Trajan’s feat in engineering and building the bridge into Dacia. Utilizing technology invented during the salvage of Abu Simbel, the monument imperiled by the Aswan Dam in Egypt, the monumental inscribed tablet was sliced off the cliff-face and relocated on another sheer face of rock about 40 meters higher than the original location. Another cultural resource flooded by the dam was the island of Adah Kaleh (Turkish for “Island Fort”). This was strange settlement primarily inhabited by Ottoman Turk smugglers. The island occupied the middle of the Danube in the gorge and was said to contain “a thousand twisting alleys” as well as an impressive mosque completed in 1903. (There was an exquisite carpet in the mosque that seems to have been preserved in some museum or another.) The village had a unique culture. Some of the town’s old houses were relocated to the Romanian river bank, on a slope high enough not to be inundated by the lake waters and the mosque was moved as well. But the village was liminal, neither Romanian nor Yugoslavian, nominally Ottoman but, even, outside the law of that empire. The remarkable extra-territorial aspect of Adah Koleh was a consequence of it existing in no country at all – that is, an island between political realms. (The city was de jure managed by Ottoman officials as the last Turkish outpost in Europe until 1923, but, in truth, no one really administered the place.) Needless to say, the somewhat disreputable features of the island city-state couldn’t be replicated by moving some of its old buildings and it has been lost. People who want to know what it was like will have to be content with Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of the smuggler’s village in his book Between the Woods and the Water (1986).
The surface survey for archaeological salvage on the soon-to-be inundated shores of the gorge identified segments of old Roman road, some medieval castles, and many tiny villages occupied by the mid- and late-Neolithic Starcevo culture. The Starcevo people had primitive pottery and raised some crops as well maintaining livestock. No one seems much interested in them – they were poor and led hard lives, nasty, brutish and short, one supposes. Apparently, their impoverished settlements are ubiquitous in the Danube area. On a horseshoe-shaped bend in the Danube, on the right or Serbian side of the river, surface inspection showed some Starcevo-era pottery and remains of a few squalid huts. “A very poor place,” the Serbian archaeologists remarked. The Starcevo site occupied a concave lens of limestone terrace, not more than a couple hundred yards wide, and only a few feet above the Danube. In the middle of the neolithic village, the Romans had erected a small fortified watch-tower, apparently to protect their road. The Danube next to the horseshoe-shaped terrace is turbulent. This is, in fact, the location of Djerdap, the feature that gives the gorge one of its names. Djerdap is Serbo-Croatian for red-clay vortex – there is a huge whirlpool in the river just a few meters offshore from the right bank of the Danube. The whirlpool has always trapped fish in its spiral currents and, so, the edges of the vortex spinning up against the river bank were a good place to net and spear these creatures, some of them huge sturgeon weighing three- or four-hundred pounds.
Expecting nothing of any significance, the Serbian field surveyor cut two trial trenches into the soil on the shelf above the river, opening an area of 51 square meters through the debris of the Starcevo encampment. This first excavation occurred in 1965. The trenches exposed part of Lipinsky Vir, a much older, more prosperous, and entirely remarkable village built on the river terrace a couple thousand years before the Neolithic Starcevo settlement – artifacts, in fact, six-thousand years older than the Roman fortress on the Danube shelf. Nomenclature varies. The initial Serbian site reports dated the Lipinsky Vir village as early Neolithic. More precise carbon-12 dating suggests that the Lepenski Vir culture flourished at this location for about 800 years, between 5600 BC to 4950 BC – these are approximate dates that may be off by as much as 150 years. Recent chronological work with artifacts and human remains shows that similar sites on the Romanian side of the river may date back as far as 8800 BC, but that the flourishing of the culture was, between, 5700 and 4800 BC. (See Lepenski Vir- Schela Cladovei Culture’s Chronology and its Interpretation – Aurelian Rusum, Acta Musee 2011). These dates, in absolute terms, are uncertain. More recent publications claim that the Lepenski Vir settlement reached its cultural apogee during a three-hundred year period between 6300 BC to 6000 BC. The Serbs attribute the village to the Lepenski Vir culture, their name for the place. The Romanians name the culture Schela Cladovei. The most current literature says that the Lipinski Vir site is important because it demonstrates a late Mesolithic culture in transition to the early Neolithic. Neolithic people were largely sedentary, lived in villages, used pottery, farmed and raised stock animals. By contrast, Mesolithic humans were hunters and foragers, who wandered about their territorial range in family groups. They were pre-agricultural, had no domestic animals except dogs, and didn’t farm. Archaeologists are always particularly fascinated by transitional cultural types and Lepinski Vir is exactly this sort of place – a kind of “missing link” between human culture in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. Setting aside these technical and semantic considerations, the people living at Lipinski Vir inhabited a village that was founded just after the last ice-age, that is, the last period during which glaciers covered much of Europe. Their settlement precedes the pyramids in Egypt by about three-thousand years – in other words, between the Egyptian pyramids and Lipinski Vir there is about the same span of time between our age of cell-phones and air-travel and the heroic age of Homer and the Mycenaean Greeks.
What sort of place was Lepenski Vir? A formidable Serb archaeologist, Dragoslav Srejovic, supervised the rescue excavation at the site, working there from 1966 to 1971 when the structures on the site’s highest slope above the river slipped a half-meter under the rising lake-waters. Much of the work was done in haste, with the river lapping at the foundations of the ancient houses. Srejovic published his findings in 1969 in a book written in Serbo-Croatian. The text was translated into English and published in that language by Thames and Hudson in London in 1972. (There is an American version of the book under the imprint of Stein & Day printed as part of the excellent “New Aspects of Antiquity” series.) Srejovic describes the place as “Europe’s first city,” using the word “city” to denote a planned ensemble of structures for human habitation. Lepenski Vir was a very small city – at its height, it seems to have had about 130 buildings, although the exact extent of the habitation remains uncertain because now drowned under water. Srejovic is inclined to describe the culture as radically isolated, pinned between several large boulders that prevented the Danube from sweeping away the sloping terrace where the town was located. In his book, he doesn’t identify any similar sites and creates the impression that the inhabitants of Lepenski Vir likely thought themselves the only human beings in existence. (I think these assertions, implicit to his presentation, are very exaggerated although there is no doubt that the place, occupied for, at least, 120 generations was, indeed, hard to reach and cut-off from the rest of the world to some extent.) More modern studies identify one other place nearby with similarly unique architecture. Recent scholarship suggests that surveys should be undertaken along the mountain ridges to assess whether similar dwellings exist in those places. However, Lepenski Vir’s style of building is dependent on the river and, probably, could not be translated to the heights overlooking the valley.
Lepenski Vir consists of buildings that are all identical, although erected on differing scales. The general form of the structures is a trapezoid with curved corners, a sort of pie-shaped wedge with its broad side always encompassing an arc of about 60 degrees. The open end of the wedge was open, although, apparently, closed by a barricade of fire at night. The wedge narrows according to precise proportions equivalent in each structure, forming a roughly triangular shape. The top of the triangle is not a point, however, but a narrow enclosing wall. (Some archaeologists have perceived this form to be anthropomorphic – the top of the trapezoid is the “head” of the being with its body extending downward with open legs represented by the outer edges of structure. The size of the trapezoidal structures, all facing East – that is toward the Danube – varies between 1.5 square meters (the smallest dwelling) and 30 square meters (the great house). The village, at its height, was arranged with the largest house located mid-slope on the terrace above a kind of open plaza. The other houses were organized with their entries toward the rising sun around the largest structure. A tiny house, number 49, in Srejovic’s numbering, seems to have been a prototype used to provide the proportions for the larger structures scaled up on its model. House 49 was like a doll-house, probably used for some ritual purpose – although miniature, it had a fully functioning hearth in which there is evidence of fires having burned.
We understand the configuration of the village very clearly because each house was built on a concrete foundation. This concrete was made from a slurry of animal manure, limestone chips, and red clay. The foundations (or better, floors) to the houses are enduring. These were the first shapes to emerge from beneath the humus (about a half-meter thick) covering the site. (Over several hundred years, new houses were built and old ones abandoned. Therefore, the actual appearance of the exposed ruins is a jigsaw of overlapping pinkish-colored floors.) Use of this kind of concrete continued in this part of the world until modern times. “Lep” is the Serbo-Croatian term for reddish clay plaster used on houses in villages in the Iron Gates area. The name for the vortex just off-shore Lepenski Vir, Djerdap means “red-clay whirlpool.” Because the floors were durable, we can reconstruct the dwellings supported by them. At the wide eastern opening to the houses, three holes were bored into the concrete, probably when it was setting. It is presumed that these holes supported stanchions of some sort. There are two additional stanchion holes along the triangle or wedge edges toward the west, located facing one another. Therefore, it seems that the abodes were walled with some kind of organic material, probably branches with interwoven willow wicker. The walls probably sloped inward, coming to a peak six or seven feet above the floor like a wigwam. (Some scholars have suggested a wooden roof or osier-type roof supported by forked tree limbs – but this seems improbable; so far as we know, flat roofs of this sort wouldn’t be invented for a couple of thousand years.) No one knows for sure what the superstructure above the floors was like. Indeed, several rather bitter academic disputes have raged on that subject.
At the time that Lepenski Vir flourished, the hunter-gatherers who wandered Europe lived in oval wigwams, unfloored, very small, and improvised from local materials. But Lepenski Vir was sedentary, a place where people lived for more than a hundred generations in one spot. Accordingly, Europe’s first permanent buildings were made there, although the actually enduring part of the structure was the poured concrete floor. Throughout the world, various cultures have developed signs marking a continuously inhabited place. The Incas put terraces on their mountain sides, even in places where agriculture was impossible, to define the space as civilized. The Meso-Americans built pyramids to mark their cities. Medieval people had church spires. In the rural Mid-west, where I live, an inhabited place is marked by grain bins and a church steeple. At Lepenski Vir, poured concrete floors signified that these structures were built to last and that they signified a culture. Presumably in a world where the Danube river was continuously undermining the land beneath one’s feet, the idea of a permanent concrete floor was significant, the sign of distinct culture and way of dwelling.
The interiors of the houses were identical as well. A lateral burning pit extended across the east-facing entrance to the structure – this was so that the doors to the abode could be closed by flame at night. Beyond the threshold, a narrow hearth lined with stone extended east-west. These hearths always show the same proportions, although scaled-up or down according the size of the dwelling. Indeed, all proportions at Lepenski Vir seem to have been measured according to particular units that can be mathematically reconstructed. This means that the shape of each house and its interior furnishing was identical in form, although some houses were much bigger than others. At the interior terminus of the rectangular hearth, a “pebble” stone from the river was placed, chipped into a flattened disk-like form with a hole cut into its center. (It is surmised that the house fire was kept burning, perhaps, in this “pebble” rock – others believe the hole was used to pour libations, possibly honey.) Flanking the round disk-stone were two boulders, some of them as big as 60 centimeters in height. Many of these boulders were carved into sculptures of weird fishlike-humans, although only the head with staring eyes was represented. Other boulders were aniconic – that is, shaped and polished into cranial forms, but without any attempt to represent features on the rock. Farther to the west, near the back wall of the trapezoid, flat stones were embedded in the concrete – these have been called altars although, in truth, no one know how they were used. The interior furnishings of the dwellings are hard to understand. The narrow rectangular hearth is not an efficient fire-pit – heat is not evenly distributed and the only way to make sense of the shape of these hearths is that they were used for roasting meat (or smoking fish) rotisserie style, that is by way of spit that could be rotated. But this is all surmise. There is no evidence for this one way or another.
The carved stones at Lepenski Vir are justly famous. They have a peculiarly modernist appearance – someone has said that they look like works by the British sculptor Henry Moore. The boulders are egg-shaped and cut to depict goggle-eyed creatures with bags around their round, indented eyes. Some of the carvings look like the figures are wearing round granny-glasses. The creatures have a strange, desperate appearance. To me, it looks like they represent drowning people – the sculptures have round mouths that seem to gape open as if desperately seeking to inhale air. Almost all of the figures have a distinctly piscine appearance, undoubtedly some kind merman or mermaid, fish-people. One of the figures is rounded female with a face like a carp who seems to have spidery hands that are spreading apart a vulva carved on her chest. The figures all look more or less the same, although some are more elaborately carved than others. Srejovic described these carvings as the first monumental sculptures in Europe – by this he meant that the heavy boulders, although only about knee-high, were meant to endure for generations. In its classic period, the town boasted another form of monumental decoration. Slabs of rock cut into triangles (the organizing form in the place) were arrayed in low walls around the sides of the dwellings. What these demarcations meant, or why they were made, is completely unknown.
Under some of poured floors, skeletons were found, always with their skulls removed and buried next to the other bones. Further, the mandibles of the skeletons were also disarticulated and removed to be installed in the floor cement next to the skull. (Srejovic and others have noted that the shape of a human mandible viewed from overhead is approximately similar to the trapezoidal figure used to scale the houses; therefore, Srejovic conjectured that the mandible-shape may have been the model on which the houses were built – implying that the people in Lepenski Vir literally slept within the jaws of their forefathers.) The skeletons were brought into the houses when the bones were still articulated by dried sinew and tendon. This means that the corpses were stored somewhere until they had decomposed to the state that could be cemented into the house floors. Srejovic thinks the bodies where suspended in trees in the forest above the village and, then, when mostly defleshed, presumably by time, the elements, and birds, brought back into the settlement. Clearly, not all of the dead were treated in this way and, probably, only important people were interred in the floors of the houses. We don’t know what happened to the others, possibly they were just left dangling from trees in the woods until their remains were lost.
The people who lived in Lepenski Vir had no personal items of any significance. They had some lithic tool kits, cutting adzes and awls, hooks made from bone for fishing, and some boulders with grooves cut in them so that they could serve as weights for nets sunk in the river. There’s no evidence of any other adornments. The villagers didn’t have ceramic. Lepenski Vir, in its classic phase, was aceramic or pre-ceramic. Oddly enough, however, many tiny fragments of pottery were found at the site – Srejovic conjected that this material drizzled down into lower substrates from the ceramic Starcevo cultural site superimposed on the Mesolithic village. However, Srejovic admitted that there was no evidence for this occurring either, something that would have required, he thought, actual shafts – and no one admitted digging such shafts or seeding the site with tiny pottery fragments. He seems to have found these pottery shards a bit unsettling and, certainly, inexplicable. Srejovic writes from within a firmly materialist and Marxist concept of history and society. He implies that the Lepenski Vir culture was classless, without elites, and, probably, communist in orientation – no one owned anything more than anyone else, although the existence of larger houses may suggest something to the contrary.
Srejovic considers the sculptures on the site from a art-historical perspective. He distinguishes vigorous and robust forms from later periods of decadence. I confess that I have difficulty making the distinctions that he imposes on these materials. At various times in its history, the configuration of the village changed. In one era, the town seems to have divided into two moieties, each side of the village configured around a much larger house. Srejovic regards these periods as decadent, times of cultural decline. In his view, when the town was divided into two parts, the people were dissatisfied and this led to a “revolution” in which the decadent divided town, with its indifferent craftsmanship, was once again united after the paradigm of Lepenski Vir I (the town organized in its primary form about a single large house.) Although the configuration of the concrete floors supports the idea that the town evolved over time into different forms, the rest of Srejovic’s conjectures seem to me to be fantasies.
In recent years, some DNA extracted from skeletal remains has been sequenced. These tests have revealed that the inhabitants of Lepenski Vir were, in fact, genetically proto-European. They show the same haploid formation that is found in modern Caucasian inhabitants of Western and Central Europe. Genetically, the people represent a hybrid between the earlier forager hunter-gatherers in the area mixed with genes characteristic of Asia Minor – that is, Turkey and the Middle East. It seems that around 8000 BC, immigrants (or invaders) from Asia Minor followed the Danube into central Europe and intermingled with the clans roaming that area. Srejovic’s rather exuberant claims that Lepenski Vir represents the foundations of Western Europe have turned-out to be, at least, provisionally correct.
In his book, Srejovic suggests several times that the Lepenski Vir people represent a cultural phase transitional from the Gravettian paleolithic hunter-gatherers to the Neolithic village society characteristic in Europe about six-thousand years ago. The Gravettian “industry,” meaning a cultural group as defined by their stone tools, foraged across Europe between 26,000 and 23,000 years before the present. The Gravettians were handsome, their men usually a little over six feet tall, with high cheekbones and they had evolved a civilization that seems peculiar to us today but was highly developed. Gravettian sites feature startlingly beautiful art mobilier (that is, small figurines carved from bone and ivory) and spectacular burials. These people smeared corpses with red ocher (hematite clay) and wrapped them in elaborately woven shrouds. The dead were interred with hundreds, in some cases, thousands, of pierced beads made from shell and ivory, wore intricate bracelets and necklaces made from pendent teeth of Arctic fox, and clutched in their hands elaborately carved scepters sculpted from elk and mammoth bones. (Some Gravettians specialized in hunting mammoth and lived in huts supported by ivory tusks and the rib-cages of those animals.) Il Princepe (“the young Prince”) was a fifteen year old boy who died when his jaw was stove in – he was buried wearing a skull-cap decorated with over 200 shell-beads woven into the fabric. The lady of Caviglione was, apparently, a high-status woman in her community. She was also buried with an elaborate cap entirely covered in beads, her body encased in red ocher. Other graves include enigmatic double and triple burials, often of people with congenital deformities or birth defects, some of the bodies draped in shawls decorated with thousands and thousands of beads and fringed with the teeth of elk and fox. The Gravettian “archaeological industry,” as it is now called, was a cultural complex uniform across all of Europe and extending into central Asia. These people lived in harsh conditions – most of the continent was covered in ice and the moors and tundra that they roamed had a sub-arctic climate. It appears that the Gravettians lived in caves or dug oval pit-houses and may, even, have lived for years at a time in settlements like villages – although, in truth, these places were more like hunting camps. They carried so-called Venus figures, elegantly carved art mobilier, with protuberant breasts and buttocks and may have worshiped the animals that they pursued. It is seductive to consider the people at Lepenski Vir, heirs to the sophisticated Gravettians, but I think evidence is lacking to make any real connection between the two group. After all, 14,000 years separate the efflorescence of the two cultures and this is simply too immense a time-gap to bridge by mere conjecture.
In 1971, the exposed ruins at Lepenski Vir were peeled off the terrace beside the Danube and rescued by removal, as at Abu Simbel, to a higher location in the gorge. The red concrete floors with their ensembles of hearths, pebble stones, altars, and sculptures were lifted to a shelf cut into the hillside about 38 meters above the former village site. An elaborate shelter built from curved steel girders was raised over the rebuilt settlement and white walkways with viewpoints hovering over the ruins were installed around the site’s perimeter. The structure looks like an impressive, modernist greenhouse with innumerable panels of glass hanging on the struts over the red trapezoidal floors covering the terraced hillside. Critics note that the site looks more intact than it is. Removal of the floors and their adjacent packed clay and river cobble substrata was difficult and, in fact, most of the concrete simply crumbled into dust when efforts were made to lift the floors from the terrain soon to be inundated. Nonetheless, the site remains spectacular, although most of it has been rebuilt from scratch – the curiously shaped floors provide a schematic village lay-out visible to tourists who now can walk around the edge of the ruins under the sloping glass and white girder roof.
Srejovic’s understanding of the archaeology of Lepenski Vir seems generally sound, although some of his conjectures, probably, can’t be supported. For instance, he describes the sociology of the Lepenski Vir people as “strongly masculine” in character – I don’t know how the evidence supports this intuition. Srejovic was overly emphatic in his estimation that the Lepenski Vir settlement was wholly isolated. Nonetheless, all artifacts found in the settlement originate within 30 kilometers of the village – no trade items have been found. All literature about Lepenski Vir that I have seen exhibits an odd failure to address what seems to me to be a fundamental question: did these people have boats of some kind? Did they use canoes or rafts or the sort of hide and wicker “bull” boats that were common among American Indians? Nothing answers this question and I think it’s puzzling that this obvious subject has been ignored. (In some parts of the world, for instance, the Nile basin, dug-out canoes dating to the Mesolithic period have been unearthed. But there’s no reference in the literature about finds of this kind in the Lepenski Vir area.) After Srejovic’s work on the site, Archaeo-astronomy, developed into a significant influence on our understanding of the Neolithic period – for instance, a solar box was found at the Newgrange passage grave on the Boyne in Ireland, carefully positioned to direct the rays of the sun on summer solstice into the tomb. Stonehenge, another Neolithic site, has long been considered a kind of complex observatory. In keeping with this trend, analysis at Lepenski Vir demonstates that on the Summer Solstice, the sun rises directly over the huge monolith of porphyry, the 1800 foot sheer butte called Treskavac, on the opposing or east bank of the Danube. In fact, a stony horn atop the towering rock face splits the sun into two lobes as it rises over the mountain – thereby, creating a momentary effect of two suns rising simultaneously. These sorts of phenomenon are known to have fascinated people in the Neolithic period and there’s no reason to think that the townsfolk at Lepenski Vir weren’t aware of this spectacle. However, whether they located their village in accord with this celestial phenomenon or, later, discovered it during the 120 generations they lived at the place is unknown. My guess is the latter – none of the cultural material found at the site seems astronomical in character and the effigies of fish-gods (or fish-ancestors) refer to the river, its torrents and whirlpools, and its lightless depths.
Dragoslav Srejovic ends the descriptive part of his book (it has several technical appendices) with this flourish:
(T)he old ideology lost its value (with tilling of the soil...and domesticated animals) and the monumental art inspired by it finally disappeared. (Later) the great myth had been replaced by popular superstitions and its art replaced by the standard products of craftsmanship. Something nonetheless remained...(artifacts produced by later cultures in the area) were original for they were always rational and always linked with man and his destiny. This rationality, combined with humanity, was also cultivated in all later periods of the Danube Basin and remains a lasting feature of Balkan and all European civilization.
Srejovic was an interesting figure himself. Born in 1931, he was openly gay at a time when this was rare. Srejovic died in November 1996, about a year after the Serbs perpetrated the Srbenica massacre, and between the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. Pictures show him to be a pugnacious, bald man with a raptor’s hooked beak and an oddly crooked upper lip. In the photographs that I have seen, the famous archaeologist looks harried and belligerent; in one picture, he seems to be wiping the sweat from his brow. He is important in Yugoslavian and, then, Serbian history to the extent that a postage stamp issues by his homeland in 2021 bears his likeness. The commemorative depicts Srejovic on its right side, an unsmiling imperious looking figure. Next to him, the stamp shows three of the statues unearthed at Lepenski Vir, the rather bestial monument from the so-called “sanctuary under the rocks,” the famous female figure, and an odd bulbous gill-man with fish-mouth (sculpture no. 43). The rounded forms of the monuments rhyme with Dr. Srejovic’s bald head and there is something paternal about the image: the dour unsmiling Serbian archaeologist portrayed next to his monstrous children.
