Excavation of a Thracian Burial Mound
We were recently down visiting friends who live close to Chirpan and decided to pop along and see what was happening at the excavation of a Thracian burial mound in the area. We did not expect to be able to see much and were all ready to be told to ‘go away’ and have to make a quick exit. But to our surprise this was not the case. We stopped on the edge of the mound and could see they had already started excavating the mound in long, straight trenches. The sight foreman, a university student studying archaeology came over. He spoke some English and offered to show us what they had discovered so far. He explained the mound had lain undiscovered as was all over grown with trees and shrubs and was a dumping ground for rubbish. There was a larger scale excavation of a Thracian village going on nearby and they were just exploring several tombs in the area. They had only just begun the dig but had already come across around 20 skeletons buried in shallow graves across the top of the mound. These were not that old and represented early Christian burials and it was common for later religions and people to re-use sights of significance for their own dead. The skeletons were still in the ground awaiting a visit by an anthropologist, when they would be properly dated and carefully removed for examination.
We asked if there were any other tombs in the area we could visit and were told to drive to the next door village and we’d see the excavations the same team had done a few months back. We followed the directions given and came across what can only be described as a pile of rubble around a large hole and much discarded rubbish. We were thinking we had actually just happened upon the village rubbish dump, when we spotted a sign saying that these were excavations of Roman-Thracian ruins and funded by the governments of Skandinavia. There was nothing much to see, although we did find a plastic bag full of small shards of bones (whether human or animal we were not sure) and another bag of broken pottery.
Further up, on the top of a nearby hill, we could see a distinctive burial mound and decided to head up the track in the 4×4. We reached the mound and from the direction we approached in it seemed the mound was untouched, although there was an old security caravan close by and the ‘obligatory’ bags of
rubbish and plastic bottles lying around. But on climbing up the mound and on closer inspection, we were astonished to what appeared to be a half-finished excavation.
The earth had been removed from half of the tomb, exposing the entrance to the tomb and a circular chamber made from massive, carefully cut square slabs. We hopped down into the chamber and could see a small entrance going into a narrow tunnel, heading further into the tomb. One by one, we crawled into the tiny tunnel to see if it led anywhere but without torches and dressed only in shorts and t-shirts with flip flops on, we were not really prepared for exploring much and in any case the tunnel seemed to branch into two and then peter out.
The main chamber had areas left in the stone floor that were just bare earth, possibly were animals had been sacrificed and then buried to follow the Thracian leader to the after life, such as his horse and hunting dogs. The bones of such sacrificial animals have been found in other tombs.
It was an amazing experience to just be able to wander round and explore the tomb and we decided we would make more of an effort to go and find out more about the tombs that dot the landscape of Bulgaria, particularly along the Kazanlak valley.
