Major Milestone achieved at the Megalithic Portal

Submitted by AlexHunger on Friday, 10 August 2007 Page Views: 2857

**Balgarska Poliana** submitted by sasho : Very well preserved Tracian dolmen located near the road between Balgarska Poliana and Hliabovo villlages in Sakar mountain, Bulgaria (Vote or comment on this photo)

This summer we surpassed 30,000 photos and 17,000 site pages on the Megalithic Portal, which has in turn meant updates to our Megalith Map as well as the Google Earth downloads. With all the input from the last several months, particularly in the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Syria and the US, we now have near continuous coverage from Arizona to the Tigris river in Iraq, if you look at it from East to West and ignore the watery depth of the Atlantic.

Many of the sites we have collected in the Middle East, are ancient cities and temples, but we hope that these seeds will attract new members to photograph megalithic sites in their neighbourhood just as has occurred in Jordan. Just as an example, a Turkish language book I saw in a museum, which I simply could not understand due to my language limitations, showed pictures of megalithic sites in Turkey which would be of interest to us. With people bumping into our website, we hope they will feel inclined to become local contributors, especially with regards to more obscure sights the casual tourist usually misses.

Similarly we have had to bend our site definitions slightly to allow us to add sites built by the native peoples of North and South America. A productive seam of information has been our monitoring of news reports from the hundreds of local newspapers in the USA. Because of their source they often end up as 'text only' listings, so we are still rather lagging in photographic images from across the Atlantic. Unlike in the UK, prehistory enthusiasts seem few and far between here, but as shown by the proliferation of modern tributes to Stonehenge and other strange and wonderful modern megalithic creations it is clear that the interest is there to be nurtured, which is what we aim to do. We are fortunate to have two US enthusiasts as site admins, who are showing us such diverse sites as mounds, pueblos and the elusive rock piles.

In Europe, we still have gaps in Slovenia and Montenegro, but these are small countries and we are hopeful that contributions will appear as soon as word gets around about the site pages we currently have from Romania, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia. To contrast with this we now have over 2500 images from France alone, thanks in no small measure to a certain man and his megalithic camper van, but also increasingly due to a large number of local contributors.

The same situation is occurring in Germany where we now have two multilingual site admins able to deal with German and French language contributions. We are also expanding northwards with Russian and Bulgarian sites being contributed.

Beyond that, we have received a few small but elusive photos from Korea and a more substantial trove on India which lead us to believe the sun never sets on Megalithic enthusiasm. The site’s growth in Eastern Europe and the Middle East will certainly help us to remain the leading megalithic website world wide, and generate enthusiasm for these wonderful monuments in their home countries.

Finally we mustn't forget our origins, England and Scotland where we have over 10,000 images and 5000 images respectively. So those two countries still contribute over half our collection. (and I'd better not forget to mention Wales with approaching 2500 images)

Thank you all for your efforts in making the Megalithic Portal what it is today.

AlexHunger
Joint Site Admin for Germany and Eastern Europe

Contributor Bio for AlexHunger: Based in Zurich, Switzerland, contributing since 2004. Favourite site: Roche Aux Fees. Occupation: Investor Relations.

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