An Interesting Situation / Problem A
A Bosnian joke: An ant in a jungle sees a beautiful lady elephant up above him. He tells all his friends he's going to fuck her. They say, "You talk too much!" "She won't even feel you!"
One day he climbs up her leg. He's there, he starts fucking her. He's really getting into it. A coconut falls on her head, and she screams out. He yells, "Suffer, baby, suffer!"
I've been here three weeks, and I still don't completely get it. It's not that life here is so different. I have friends, I have a girlfriend, I have a job. We go out for coffee, we play foosball, we have fun, we get bored. We joke around and talk about life. What could be more ordinary?
But things here are strange. The hospitality is enormous, bordering on wasteful. It is unheard of to take a doggy bag of your leftovers. People never split the bill; if you have enough, pay the whole thing, if not, don't worry (the saying 'don't worry, be happy' apparently came here recently, and is very popular). They expect you to be as generous as they are, in every way. I've gotten calls at 2 am on nights when I came home early, a testy friend, asking, "Where the fuck are you?"
People here are often missing teeth from water shortages in the war, from careless negligence. It's not a big deal, they still have wide smiles. If parallel parking isn't your thing, pull into a spot diagonally, it's understandable. Once, driving with Semir, we pulled back sharply, winging a dumpster and amputating the passenger rearview, leaving it dangling by a cord. We didn't even stop.
And of course, there are the pyramids.
<<<>>>
I know what you're thinking: "There are no pyramids in Bosnia. How absurd." I'm going to tow the company line here: That remains to be seen.
Actually, the company line, paraphrased from one of Semir Osmanagic's more lucid explanations: "These are monumental structures, which we believe to be man-made, in the shape of pyramids – therefore we call them pyramids."
Semir Osmanagic, the man behind the project, the originator of the project, who bravely stood in the hills of Visoko two years ago and said, "I think we have pyramids here." Semir Osmanagic, called Uncle Sam by the people here, who have been fairly raking in the cash, "the kind of man Jesus must have been" by a recent interview subject, who has a profile on the SETI@Home website, a "cult leader" by a member of my small circle of "pyramid agnostics" (I'm proud of this expression, this response to my observation that, when asked what they think of the pyramids, 9 out of 10 locals will say, in stilted, perhaps corrupted English, "I believe in pyramids"). As for me, I'm still not sure, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I will try to be kind, Semir, but you scare me. A question I ask myself: Why am I more comfortable with swindlers and charlatans than with people who believe they are telling the truth?
<<<>>>
A soundbite from Semir's interview with Amra Agovic, Bosnian-born, Australian-accented for SBS, a 16-affiliate Aussie radio network: "When I established this foundation, I said it should last for 200 years."
I get up every day at 8 or thereabouts, get a coffee, then hitch a ride to one pyramid or the other, trying to find some heat. I call myself a "web journalist." I do 400-word interviews and some information gathering, a lot of sitting around.
More impressive is my situation: I stay at the Motel Piramida Sunca (formerly Motel Hollywood – still, above the threshold of the restaurant, gold letters spelling 'HOOLLYWOOD' remain), where many of the project's international types stay. I currently have meals with Robert Schoch and Colette Dovell, superstars of the alternative history circuit, their ideas very much in line with Semir's. They seem like solid people. I never much trust first impressions, but here, with the line skewed so far from center, the difference between the open-minded and the conspiracy theorists gets easier to detect.
More valuable to my thinking was my introduction to Nancy Gallou, a Greek archaeologist who I spent most of my first ten days with before she left, exhausted and frustrated with the project. The girl is an absolute gem. One day, turning to me before either of us had had our coffee, she said, "Do you want to know what I think of journalists? I think journalists should be strangled from birth."
Nancy is a skeptic, but one open-minded enough to spend two months volunteering on the project. She is a kindred spirit who I still talk to regularly, from her new base at a paleolithic cave exploration in Greece ("a real archaeological project," she tells me, with some venom), and one of two monkeys on my shoulders, fighting a war between my ears.
The other is Semir. When Semir says, "This is a new kind of archaeology," Nancy says, "This is bugger archaeology!" (actually, this is [former Croatian professor of archaeology] Sonja's line, on seeing bulldozers knock off a section of topsoil from the Pyramid of the Sun). In the eyes of the scientific community, these crude methods of digging invalidate any potential findings. You can't ignore 500 years of scientific method because you feel it doesn't apply to you, then turn around and ask for the approval of those for whom this is dogma. When Semir asks, "What about the scratches and symbols we found on those rocks?" Nancy answers, "Maybe it was the workers with their pickaxes."
This is Problem A.
This place is like a theme park.
<<<>>>
Every day the unskilled workers cut more of the hillside away. They find rocks which look like tiles, some which don't. They form these rocks into shelves, in the style of the step-pyramids which adorn the digitally-altered postcards of Visoko. Fuck me if the thing isn't well starting to resemble a pyramid.
So it's here I get to the crux of my argument, the best reason for me staying on a project whose stated prospects are unlikely at best.
Maybe we're not learning how some pyramids were built or what super-civilization could have been responsible, but why people built them in the first place.
This quote of Semir's is out of context, and perhaps he gave away more than he meant to at the time. In any case: "The newest adventure is the Bosnian adventure."
One day he climbs up her leg. He's there, he starts fucking her. He's really getting into it. A coconut falls on her head, and she screams out. He yells, "Suffer, baby, suffer!"
I've been here three weeks, and I still don't completely get it. It's not that life here is so different. I have friends, I have a girlfriend, I have a job. We go out for coffee, we play foosball, we have fun, we get bored. We joke around and talk about life. What could be more ordinary?
But things here are strange. The hospitality is enormous, bordering on wasteful. It is unheard of to take a doggy bag of your leftovers. People never split the bill; if you have enough, pay the whole thing, if not, don't worry (the saying 'don't worry, be happy' apparently came here recently, and is very popular). They expect you to be as generous as they are, in every way. I've gotten calls at 2 am on nights when I came home early, a testy friend, asking, "Where the fuck are you?"
People here are often missing teeth from water shortages in the war, from careless negligence. It's not a big deal, they still have wide smiles. If parallel parking isn't your thing, pull into a spot diagonally, it's understandable. Once, driving with Semir, we pulled back sharply, winging a dumpster and amputating the passenger rearview, leaving it dangling by a cord. We didn't even stop.
And of course, there are the pyramids.
<<<>>>
I know what you're thinking: "There are no pyramids in Bosnia. How absurd." I'm going to tow the company line here: That remains to be seen.
Actually, the company line, paraphrased from one of Semir Osmanagic's more lucid explanations: "These are monumental structures, which we believe to be man-made, in the shape of pyramids – therefore we call them pyramids."
Semir Osmanagic, the man behind the project, the originator of the project, who bravely stood in the hills of Visoko two years ago and said, "I think we have pyramids here." Semir Osmanagic, called Uncle Sam by the people here, who have been fairly raking in the cash, "the kind of man Jesus must have been" by a recent interview subject, who has a profile on the SETI@Home website, a "cult leader" by a member of my small circle of "pyramid agnostics" (I'm proud of this expression, this response to my observation that, when asked what they think of the pyramids, 9 out of 10 locals will say, in stilted, perhaps corrupted English, "I believe in pyramids"). As for me, I'm still not sure, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I will try to be kind, Semir, but you scare me. A question I ask myself: Why am I more comfortable with swindlers and charlatans than with people who believe they are telling the truth?
<<<>>>
A soundbite from Semir's interview with Amra Agovic, Bosnian-born, Australian-accented for SBS, a 16-affiliate Aussie radio network: "When I established this foundation, I said it should last for 200 years."
I get up every day at 8 or thereabouts, get a coffee, then hitch a ride to one pyramid or the other, trying to find some heat. I call myself a "web journalist." I do 400-word interviews and some information gathering, a lot of sitting around.
More impressive is my situation: I stay at the Motel Piramida Sunca (formerly Motel Hollywood – still, above the threshold of the restaurant, gold letters spelling 'HOOLLYWOOD' remain), where many of the project's international types stay. I currently have meals with Robert Schoch and Colette Dovell, superstars of the alternative history circuit, their ideas very much in line with Semir's. They seem like solid people. I never much trust first impressions, but here, with the line skewed so far from center, the difference between the open-minded and the conspiracy theorists gets easier to detect.
More valuable to my thinking was my introduction to Nancy Gallou, a Greek archaeologist who I spent most of my first ten days with before she left, exhausted and frustrated with the project. The girl is an absolute gem. One day, turning to me before either of us had had our coffee, she said, "Do you want to know what I think of journalists? I think journalists should be strangled from birth."
Nancy is a skeptic, but one open-minded enough to spend two months volunteering on the project. She is a kindred spirit who I still talk to regularly, from her new base at a paleolithic cave exploration in Greece ("a real archaeological project," she tells me, with some venom), and one of two monkeys on my shoulders, fighting a war between my ears.
The other is Semir. When Semir says, "This is a new kind of archaeology," Nancy says, "This is bugger archaeology!" (actually, this is [former Croatian professor of archaeology] Sonja's line, on seeing bulldozers knock off a section of topsoil from the Pyramid of the Sun). In the eyes of the scientific community, these crude methods of digging invalidate any potential findings. You can't ignore 500 years of scientific method because you feel it doesn't apply to you, then turn around and ask for the approval of those for whom this is dogma. When Semir asks, "What about the scratches and symbols we found on those rocks?" Nancy answers, "Maybe it was the workers with their pickaxes."
This is Problem A.
This place is like a theme park.
<<<>>>
Every day the unskilled workers cut more of the hillside away. They find rocks which look like tiles, some which don't. They form these rocks into shelves, in the style of the step-pyramids which adorn the digitally-altered postcards of Visoko. Fuck me if the thing isn't well starting to resemble a pyramid.
So it's here I get to the crux of my argument, the best reason for me staying on a project whose stated prospects are unlikely at best.
Maybe we're not learning how some pyramids were built or what super-civilization could have been responsible, but why people built them in the first place.
This quote of Semir's is out of context, and perhaps he gave away more than he meant to at the time. In any case: "The newest adventure is the Bosnian adventure."
posted by Ed Weinberg at 2:35 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks a lot!
http://www.piramida.bloger.hr/post/zabijanje-trna-u-okosopstvenom-rukom/53510.aspx
I'd like to ask how you can reconcile having this text in your Mid-week Update for 3.08.2006:
"This week has also brought many guests and volunteers, led by superstar American geologists Prof. Robert Schoch and Colette Dovell, who arrived on July 31 and will stay until August 9. The geologists have been inspecting the pyramids and tunnels, and will present their findings next week."
with the one of 15-08-06 currently only available in Bosnian?
Btw - the translation is mine; I thought the individuals in question were entitled to know what was being said (but not translated!) about them:
Comments regarding the visit of Dr. Schoch and Dr. Dowell to Visoko:
15-08-06
In recent days there has been intensive discussion in certain media on the preliminary report of Dr. of Philosophy and Parapsychology Colette Dowell, who is assistant to the geologist Dr. Robert Schoch, who spent twelve days visiting the Archaeological Park Foundation, the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun and Bosnia & Herzegovina. On this, the Foundation publishes a statement by the President of the Board, Semir Osmanagic, which comments the preliminary report of the guests from the USA.
The initial contact, followed by a visit, came from Dr. Dowell in
June. The initiative was accepted, and the President of the Board of
the Foundation, Semir Osmanagic, decided to host them and cover the costs of their stay.
”The scientific scepticism of Robert Schoch is shown in the case of
the underwater structures between Japan and Taiwan, which are clearly man-made. His expertise, on the other hand, is demonstrated by his becoming world-famous after publishing three books on the age of the Sphinx in Egypt, which report it is as being far older than the conventional figures. In view of the fact that the Foundation is open to all, it was our pleasure to accept the request to host Dr. Schoch at the
greatest geo-archaeological exploration site in the world this year.
In conversations with Robert on the Bosnian pyramids, he
expressed views which suggested he thinks that currently there are
insufficient arguments to confirm that the formation is indeed man-made. He believes that a lot more work must be done to confirm this
hypothesis. In order that he and Colette understand the history of Bosnia & Herzegovina, we arranged for them to visit the pyramids of the Sun and Moon, the tunnel complex beneath the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids, recent discoveries in Gornja Vratnica and Bandol near Travnik, Daorson in Herzegovina and stone spheres in Zavidovici. It is interesting that even regarding the stone spheres he did not say that they are man-made but, rather, that there is no geological explanation for them. Apparently, this is the way a geologist thinks.
We have not yet received the preliminary or final report that he promised to prepare after he returned to Boston.
In any case, the visit was useful as it faced both of us with a
test: for him - to try to understand the sheer grandeur of this complex and, for me - to try to find ways to hasten efforts to find more proof on the existence of the pyramids. Our farewell was cordial and friendly. In
addition to exchanging books, we agreed that he will return next year,
around the same time, for him to follow-up on progress in
geo-archaeological findings.
Regarding Dr. Dowell's writings, they are entirely unrelated to geologic exploration but, rather, focus on irrelevant and completely
incorrect facts and there is no need to comment on them at all. She mentions fake reports, political meddling and elections, and
presents BiH (Bosnia & Herzegovina) as a backward country. We must ignore such ill-intentioned comments and, through our work and persistence, prove the hypothesis is true and, through the Foundation, start other important projects on the territory of BiH.
Currently we have four on-going projects: in addition to the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids, we have projects on the stone spheres in BiH, on the stone temple in Bandol and on the circular stone construction in Gornja Vratnica.
Cordially,
Semir Osmanagic
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