The Heraion sanctuary near Argos

Hi everyone, here I am again with a series of videos of archaeological sites and this time, even though it may look like Sardinia or central Italy, we are actually in Greece we are in the region of Argos, on the Peloponnese, and here we have our first site this is the Herion near Argos, you can clearly see some greek stuff these are clearly huge columns, there's a retaining wall, very nicely squared, beautifully preserved but as we will see there's other stuff of interest, anyway these are already really massive blocks just to show the comparison with the human I mean the other day I had to move the base, the granite base of a sunscreen one of those, it's not really a sunscreen, I don't know how they call them in English it's like a big umbrella to screen yourself from the sun and it was probably, I would say 40 by 40 by 10 centimeters, and I really had a hard time I mean, and here are blocks which are huge compared to what I moved, I mean this block is 50 times what I moved, so well, it's always my thought about moving all these stones of course they were not alone, it was not one person, it was more than one but still, it's not an easy task, we will see more interesting stuff more upstairs it's like a series of terraces, you can see we are on the first one, there's another one over there and we will see further on others, it's weird because this seems to be some limestone this is at least, look, there's my leg, so I'm at least, it's at least one meter high but this is sandstone, another type of rock, so again we have even a mixture of different stones there's another terrace here, the place is called as I said Herion it's supposed to have been a sanctuary to the goddess Hera, built by the Argolites or people from Argos, but there's more upstairs as you will see Debra makes me notice this one stone which has a little indentation, or little, it's not that little but then this one is quite interesting, not many of these kind of puzzle type joints but a few are there, here we have another wall which is at least 4 to 5 meters high leaning on the bedrock, there's another platform over there and we start to see a third platform on top, but we will get closer now the site is officially dated the 8th century BC, so almost 3 000 years ago but even officially they say that people were living here before that so just to show you the size of these blocks, that's Debra, when she opens her arms it's about so that single block boulder is at least, yeah, more than two meters just a few of them, those are huge as well so it's an unknown site, it's free, we just got here it still has opening hours, there was a guy at the entrance but he said it's free nobody knows it, or few knows it, I only actually have to give credit to Megalithymania channel that I got to know this site, Hugh Newman came to visit it some years ago and since I came in Greece to do this tour, I was one of the sites I wanted to visit and I have to say it's really worth it, it's really, everything is huge and we start to see what actually I came here for, which is the third platform but we'll get there now, let's go around here another series of huge blocks beautiful view of the plain here in Argos and it's nice because by going up one terrace after the other you get to see better the ones below that's where we were from before with the columns and here, yeah it's just all megalithic and we see even better now the third terrace there's a few details like here you can see, there's an engraving, there's a few knobs here one, two, three, four, and here further on, here more, here there's more there's a nicely cut piece of, well I'd say limestone, but it could even be something harder it's a mixture of different types of stone again here we have this type of limestone, it's a very nicely engraved stone here actually all of these, even with the T-joints, there's a T-joint here still standing originally with the original metal that that one has gone missing these T-joints also are found all over the place, all over the world actually these look like little tubs, bathtubs or something and in the background these huge, huge blocks rounded blocks, rough, cut, and not nicely cut but they're huge, really huge look at that, you can see they were on top now just to give a sense of scale, how big they are so the story goes officially that the Argolites were kind of jealous of the Mycenae which is not far from here, Mycenae, about a couple of kilometers or something and so they built this terrace with blocks even bigger than the ones used by the Mycenae look at this, look at this block, I mean, this is, I'd guess something like yeah, 40 tons, maybe 30 okay, maybe 20 but still not more than 20 I mean, it's taller than Deborah is tall it's taller than her and it's a lot wider than her and I have no idea how deep it is but I'll soon get to see it now she's coming down just to give you a sense of scale of these blocks because it's really hard otherwise, I mean, it's huge and yeah, according to official theory they were not taken from far away they were taken from 50 meters away from this place but still, try to move that block, I mean, she's insignificant compared to them at least in size, of course, she's very significant to me and anyway, here's the whole wall going on it's, if I remember the data correctly, it's 56 meters wide by 34 meters deep now we'll get on top so it's not my usual way of proceeding but anyway, in this case I believe it makes sense to give you a comparison so I will turn the head, flip the head of the camera put myself in front of this block of stone and down there you see the other one and you can see the size of this one and this is not the biggest one now we get on top of the platform and this is the one that Deborah was standing on before I mean, you cannot even see how deep it is because it's covered by other stones and here we have a beautiful platform actually covered herself too and this is still the same block so this block starts here I can measure so it's 1 meter, 2 meters, 3 meters more than 4 meters wide, certainly more we saw before more than 1 meter 60 high and I don't know how deep, so it's huge and here we have again, it's been covered with another type of stone I believe this is again limestone whereas the big blocks are sandstone we have from here a beautiful view again, a huge block I can measure it just to give you a sense of scale so on this side it's 1, 2, 3, 4 meters it's kind of triangularly shaped and on the smaller side it's 1, 2, 3 meters so we have got something like 3 by 4 and now let me go down to see how thick it is just to give an estimate of the weight it's not very thick this one you see it's there right behind that olive tree I would guess around, let's say, 70 centimeters so I do a quick calculation and I'll be back so we have this block which is even a lot thicker than that one and hardly hard to say how deep it goes but anyway, that one by a rough calculation even dividing the weight that I got to by 2 would be 5 tons and that's really a very very rough estimate okay, I remind you that I'm 2 meters tall actually 192, but with hat and shoes it's gonna be 2 meters and this is just one of the blocks it's a very big one compared to the other ones if we turn around this corner we have this little part which is slightly polygonal you can see there's some junctions here, some joints which are more of a polygonal kind and it's weird because on the right hand side we still have sandstone then this small part with polygonal characteristics which is limestone and then further on we have again sandstone and yeah, another polygonal joint here if you can see it's quite... so it's... again, I almost get the feeling that this place has been sometime repaired you see here there's even this strange border here and the stone actually starts here and then it comes... sorry, starts here then it comes forward and then goes down so the impression again is of a site which has been used and reused by many cultures for many generations and each time a new culture would just add what they needed to it but on top of it all we have the huge megalithic platform so here is another piece of wall with... it's a squared wall but with huge stones and that's the platform over there and there's another part of a wall here so again, I mean, my question is of course we would give in the past a lot more importance to religiosity and spirituality and gods and all these things but this is huge work to make a place for a god of course we have been doing that up to the 15th century if you think at the big cathedrals even later nowadays my consideration is if you look in modern world buildings that make use of a lot of stone and usually it's just like covered with stone it's not blocks of stone but anyway it's the use of stone we usually do that for only one god which is money because banks usually have the most decorated and stone elaborated buildings but yeah we have not built stuff like this in quite a while not too long but quite a while and anyway even the most recent cathedrals which are amazing we have to recognize that they would not be made with blocks that weigh 10 tons or even more so just a few more observations here in this area just beneath the big retaining wall megalithic wall we were noticing here in this small tub or whatever it is that there's a t-junction here still with the with the metal in it there's another one there with no metal in it and the question was what were these things because there's quite some some other little engravings here square engravings you can see so what i noticed here going further on i mean we believe today that this was the original plan right that's what you would think then we see there's another engraving here for a t-junction but there's another here and there's not the continuation here there's not the other part here there should be as we just saw over there there should be another t here but there's none so unless it was put together by by archaeologists when they like restore the site it may even have been but i don't believe they would do it otherwise they would do it with all those blocks over there right so just put the blocks here just to give a sense of what it must have looked like i don't know but it also might be that these blocks were even before the culture who built this kind of stairway here and they were just recycled from previous plans in utilization they were found like this and they said okay that could be a nice step so let's just not just use it for that i mean i i don't know i haven't studied exactly the thing all the research has been done on this site and and who took it out i think schlieman worked on it as well the discoverer of troy but still i have seen these things before where blocks of stone were reused by later culture who colonized the site and these blocks here don't really make sense you see you walk here then there's another step going up and then there's another piece here with with a partly engraved little tub there's another one here there's even a hole here deborah made me notice you can go through here yeah right a perfectly round stone or a hole really nicely done so we've been here before anyway i didn't notice but deborah noticed it there's some really nice engravings here you see it's been sculpted really nicely there's more of these knobs here on this stone here yeah you see down here as well a nice greek decorations so of course the greeks were here but as usual we believe since the greeks were here the greeks built the whole site it might be but also it might not be so we just saw these from afar but just to i mean this is tons and tons and tons of stones perfectly cut all of the same height let's say so or depth however you want to call it one after the other just accumulated here like this well i guess this has been done by archaeologists so my previous guess that they might not have been done by the the junctions over there that they were not done by archaeologists it might might have been that they did it but i wouldn't see any sense and anyway they even been put into place here we have more limestone kind of rock over there is more sandstone people who did this really had time and resources that's one thing that's for sure and resources means that you have a lot of people who can afford not to work for feeding oneself but just to work for the glory of some king or for the glory of some god or just for some other reason i cannot fathom