<< Our Photo Pages >> Alepotrypa Cave - Cave or Rock Shelter in Greece in Peloponnese Peninsula

Submitted by davidmorgan on Monday, 12 March 2012  Page Views: 3780

Natural PlacesSite Name: Alepotrypa Cave
Country: Greece
NOTE: This site is 10.824 km away from the location you searched for.
Region: Peloponnese Peninsula Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Kalamata  Nearest Village: Diros
Latitude: 36.638483N  Longitude: 22.382492E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 4

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Alepotrypa Cave
Alepotrypa Cave submitted by nifitsa : The Great Hall of Alepotrypa (Foxhole) cave. After passing through the habitated region, and then the intriguing "cult" region where skulls of neolithic people were found arranged on shelves. One squeezes through a narrow pass and the Great Hall of the caves opens before you. There is a freshwater lake at the bottom, which is reputed to have cave drawings at the other side. I couldn't get there my... (Vote or comment on this photo)
Cave or Rock Shelter in Peloponnese Peninsula

An Early Neolithic necropolis dating from about 5300 BCE discovered inside a cave at Diros. It is associated with a small settlement outside the cave.

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Alepotrypa Cave
Alepotrypa Cave submitted by nifitsa : Interior of the habituated region. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Alepotrypa Cave
Alepotrypa Cave submitted by nifitsa : Returning from the lake to the antechamber. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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Nearby Images from Flickr
Peloponnes Sailing
Caves of Diros Mani peninsula Peloponnese Greece Photo Heatheronhertravels.com
Caves of Diros Mani peninsula Peloponnese Greece Photo Heatheronhertravels.com
Caves of Diros Mani peninsula Peloponnese Greece Photo Heatheronhertravels.com
Caves of Diros Mani peninsula Peloponnese Greece Photo Heatheronhertravels.com

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"Alepotrypa Cave" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Re: Alepotrypa Cave by nifitsa on Wednesday, 02 June 2021
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https://novoscriptorium.com/2019/07/22/alepotrypa-cave-ksagounaki-greece-a-burial-complex-and-megaliths-from-the-neolithic-age/



Not a bad summary of this astonishing place. I believe it is still closed to the public in an effort to protect it. Apparently catastrophic damage was done when it was initially found, and then with later efforts to commercialise the site. A great shame as is had been sealed intact by an earthquake or rockfall thousands of years earlier.
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Ancient cave speaks of Hades myth by davidmorgan on Monday, 12 March 2012
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Hades wasn't the happiest place. There, in a gloomy underworld, departed heroes such as Achilles gathered mostly to grouse about their boredom, and await the verdict of the judges of the dead.

"I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead," said Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, commenting on the scenery, according to the ancient poem, The Odyssey.

But for archaeologists, a Greek cave that has sparked comparisons to Hades looks more like heaven. Overlooking a quiet Greek bay, Alepotrypa Cave contains the remains of a Stone Age village, burials, a lake and an amphitheater-sized final chamber that saw blazing rituals take place more than 5,000 years ago. All of it was sealed from the world until modern times, and scholars are only now reporting what lies within.

"What you see there almost cannot be described," says archaeologist Anastasia Papathanasiou of the Greek Ministry of Culture, a director of the Diros Project Team. "There is almost no Neolithic (Stone Age) site like it in Europe, certainly none with so many burials."

So far, her team has uncovered about 160 burials inside the cave, from a time 7,000 to 5,200 years ago (5000 to 3200 BC) when farming first spread to Europe. The lives those farmers led inside and outside the cave, across the remote Mani Peninsula of southern Greece, offer fresh insights into life at the dawn of civilization in Europe.

"They were living in a large village outside the cave," says Mike Galaty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., a co-director of the project's survey efforts with Willam Parkinson of Chicago's Field Museum. "And some were inside too, we think, when the entrance collapsed," Galaty says.

Inside, the cave is covered with a layer of greasy ash , left over from ritual fires that may have marked burials there (and reburials, as many of the skeletons are within ossuaries, stone boxes where remains were placed years after their first burial.) "It is quite dark inside, quite black," Papathanasiou says. "But the state of preservation is excellent."

From that preservation, they know the Stone Age farmers at the site ate a diet heavy in barley and wheat with little meat or fish. Although a full reconstruction of the region's prehistoric climate awaits, they know from plant remains that it was wetter and more forested in ancient times. And analyses of the burial skeletons show people who were not much different physically from those in the Mediterranean today, almost as tall as tall as Greeks today, although they were slightly anemic due to a lack of meat in their diet.

About 31% of the burial skulls display an inherited line where bone plates meet, above the forehead, showing they were related, Papathanasiou says. And the noggins show a lot of signs of healed bumps and cuts, she adds. "They fought a lot."

Who did they fight? "Each other, and other people around them," she says. In a nutshell, the cave contains a record of some of Europe's first property-owners, farmers for whom claims to tillable acres were doubtless life-and-death matters worth fighting over. That also made ownership, signified by elaborate burial rituals for family members, much more worth making a fuss over.

"We don't quite know what was going on with the ritual activities, but it seems they were burning sacrificed animals, smashing pots and other pottery, and building large fires inside the cave," Galaty says. "It could have been really nasty depending on what they were burning."

Fumes coming out of mystic caves figure in big ways in ancient Greek mythology, such as the classical Oracle of Delphi who foretold the future of kings and empires. Although that was thousands of years ago, around 1400 B.C., after the closure of Alepotrypa Cave, such a relationship was suggested by the Greek archaeologist George Papathanassopoulos, who led excavations at the site starting in the 1970's.

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