Tatul

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The rock stands above the village of the same name in the eastern Rhodope, a flat-topped mass of stone some four and a half meters high, and the hand that shaped it is unmistakable. Its sides were dressed back into the four planes of a truncated pyramid. Its summit was cut flat and then cut into — a long trough like a stone coffin, a smaller rectangular basin beside it, a niche, a deep round shaft sunk into the living rock. Steps climb the slope toward it; channels run off across the surface; lower down, the stumps of later walls trace a circuit around the hill. The whole height of stone is a single quarried thing, and what was quarried from it was a place to lay the dead and to watch the sun.

The rock and its people

Tatul lies in the Kardzhali region of southern Bulgaria, in the broken volcanic country of the eastern Rhodope, roughly fifteen kilometers east of Momchilgrad. The sanctuary occupies a rocky height just outside the modern village; its coordinates fall near 41.54° north and 25.55° east, pinned to the outcrop itself rather than to the houses below. This is Thracian ground. The Rhodope and the valleys of the Hebrus belonged, through the long pre-Roman millennia, to the peoples the Greeks called Thracians, and the eastern range in particular is dense with their holy places — heights worked into shrines, rock cut into stair and seat and basin, the stone itself made an instrument of cult. Tatul is among the grandest of them.

The eastern Rhodope is a country built for this kind of cult. It is a land of volcanic tuff and rhyolite, soft enough to carve and hard enough to hold the carving, raised into ridges and crags that stand apart from the valleys around them. The Thracians who lived here did not, on the whole, build temples of cut block in the Greek manner; they took the rock as they found it and worked it where it stood — cutting steps into a crag, basins and channels into a ledge, halls and seats and altars into the faces of a height. A worked rock was itself the holy thing, not the housing of one. Tatul, with its dressed pyramid, carries that habit to its boldest pitch: instead of shaping a face of the rock, the whole free-standing mass was quarried back into a single deliberate form. It is, in that, without a close twin among the sanctuaries of the range — the only carved pyramid of its kind in the Bulgarian lands.

The working of the rock was not the labor of a single generation. The earliest material gathered around the hill reaches deep into prehistory; the heart of the sanctuary, the pyramid and the tombs cut into its top, belongs to the late Bronze Age, to the centuries between roughly the seventeenth and the eleventh before the common era, when the site reached its first height. Clay altars by the dozen, recovered in the excavations, carry the cult back into the second millennium; an iron-age idol and the long sequence of votive material show the place in use across the first millennium as well, through the centuries when the Odrysian kings ruled the Thracian plain and the Greek cities watched from the coast. Around the sacred rock, in the later pre-Roman and then the Roman ages, a fortified circuit went up — the wall whose foundations survive — and structures were added that reach into the second and third centuries of the common era. The objects lifted from the ground span an enormous arc of time, from the copper age to the medieval, which is to say that for some five thousand years people came to this rock and left something on it.

That arc, and the dressed pyramid at its center, were recovered through modern excavation. The systematic study of Tatul belongs to the Bulgarian archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov, whose campaigns at the site ran across the middle of the 2000s — resumed in 2004 and continued through 2005 and 2007 — in parallel with his long excavation of the nearby rock-city of Perperikon, which he had begun in 2000. The record of those campaigns and of the monument they uncovered is gathered in the published account of the Tatul Sanctuary and in the description maintained by the Bulgarian national tourism portal. The two monuments belong to one landscape and one tradition: the eastern Rhodope as a country of Thracian rock-sanctuaries, of which Perperikon is the vast acropolis and Tatul the carved pyramid. What the digging found at Tatul was not a settlement but a cult-place — altars, cult platforms, the deep shaft, the worked summit — a sanctuary built around the rock and around the tombs cut into its head.

The rock-tombs and the cult of the dead

What sets Tatul apart, even among the rock-shrines of the range, is the summit. The flat top of the pyramid was cut into two graves. The larger is a long trough, shaped like a sarcophagus, hewn into the body of the stone; beside it a smaller rectangular basin, or bed, was sunk into the rock — read by the excavators as a second, lesser tomb, or as the seat of an altar. A semicircular niche cuts into one face above the sarcophagus. A round well, some three meters deep, drops into the rock nearby. The steps that climb the slope lead up to this worked platform, the highest and most sacred point of the complex, where the graves lie open to the sky.

The reading that the excavation set on these features is a cult of the dead bound to the sun. The dead — or the one honored dead — were laid in the high rock, at the top of the dressed pyramid, and venerated there; the trough and the niche are the furniture of that veneration, the place where the body lay and the place where offering was made. And the cutting of the summit was oriented, in the interpretation advanced from the digging, to the movement of the sun. The niche and the carved features have been read for the rising and the setting of the sun on particular days of the year — the trough aligned to the sun at the equinox, a crevice catching the sunrise at the winter solstice — so that the rock served as a place to observe the sun as well as to house the dead. A cult of a sun-god, a cult of the dead, and the architecture that joins them: this is how the sanctuary has been understood by those who uncovered it.

To set the dead at the high point of a worked landscape is a recurring gesture in the Thracian world. The plains to the north are studded with the great burial mounds of Thracian aristocracy and kings, some of them raised over chambered tombs that were themselves places of cult; the rock-shrines of the Rhodope cut their basins and seats into the most commanding heights. At Tatul the two come together — the tomb is not under a heaped mound but cut into the summit of a quarried rock, the most exposed and most labored point of the whole monument, open to the weather and the light. Whoever was laid in the trough at the top was raised, in death, to the place where the rock met the sky. The honoring of such a dead, the offerings carried up the steps to the worked platform, the cult that gathered around the high grave: this is the sense the excavation has read into the summit, and it sits well with what is known of the Thracians’ way with their dead.

The frame here is the Thracian one, and it is worth holding its registers apart. That the summit bears two rock-cut graves, that a deep shaft was sunk beside them, that steps and channels and a later wall surround the rock — these are facts of the stone, recovered by excavation, and they belong to the firmest kind of evidence. That the rock-tombs express a cult of the dead, the high dead honored at the holy point of a worked landscape, is a reading internal to the world of the sanctuary and a plausible one, given how the Thracian rock-shrines and the great tomb-mounds elsewhere bind the dead to the sacred. That the niche was cut to reckon the solstice and the equinox is an interpretation — an inference drawn from the orientation of the features, persuasive to its proposers but not provable from the stone, and best marked as such. The rock does not say in words what it was for; the words are the excavators’, read off the cut of the stone.

The Thracians left almost no writing of their own, and nothing at all that names this place or explains it. What can be said of Tatul comes from two directions: from the mute, abundant evidence of the rock itself — the pyramid, the graves, the altars, the votive objects — read by the archaeologists; and from the broader knowledge of Thracian religion gathered out of the Greek and Roman authors and out of the other sanctuaries of the range. There is no ancient text that describes the rite at Tatul, no inscription that gives the name of the god or of the one buried at the summit. The cult of the dead and the cult of the sun are inferences, well grounded but inferences, drawn across a silence.

The legend of Orpheus

Into that silence the modern age has set a name. The Rhodope is, in the Greek imagination and in the long literary tradition that followed it, the homeland of Orpheus — the singer whose music moved stones and beasts and rivers, son of the Thracian king Oeagrus and, in the common account, of the Muse Calliope. Orpheus is a figure of Greek myth and Greek poetry; the tradition makes him a Thracian, places his life and his death in the mountains of Thrace, ties him to the rites of Dionysus whom the Greeks also called a god come out of Thrace, and tells of his dismemberment by the women of his own country. He belongs, in the strict sense, to the Greek-facing reception of Thrace — to how the Greeks imagined the wild northern range as the cradle of their greatest singer — not to any surviving Thracian account of itself.

In the Greek telling Orpheus stands close to two gods at once. He is bound to Dionysus, the god the Greeks themselves traced to Thrace, and to the secret rites that bore his name; and he is bound to the lyre and to prophecy, the province of Apollo, whose instrument he was said to have perfected and whose worship some accounts make him serve. He is, in short, the Greek figure through whom the wild northern mountains were imagined as a fount of song and of mystery — a projection of Greek longing onto Thracian ground as much as a memory of anything Thracian.

It is this Orpheus that the modern tradition has fastened to the rock at Tatul. The sanctuary is now widely called the Tomb of Orpheus, or Orpheus’ Sanctuary; visitors come to it as to his grave; the legend that here, in the rock-cut tombs at the summit, lies the singer of Thrace has made the place a site of pilgrimage in the eastern Rhodope. The tie has a scholarly version as well — a hypothesis advanced from the excavation that the grave at the top of the pyramid belonged to a Thracian king, deified after his death, and that the figure behind the cult might be remembered in the later Greek myth of Orpheus. But the version that draws the crowds is the plain one: that this is his tomb.

The megalithic sanctuary at Tatul: the dressed rock pyramid, its top cut with the sarcophagus-trough and niche. Bin im Garten, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The link must be kept at its proper distance. No ancient text names Tatul as the grave of Orpheus, or names Orpheus in connection with it at all; the Greeks who wrote of the Rhodope as his country never point to this rock. The identification is a modern one, drawn from the appeal of the Rhodope as the Orphic homeland and from the striking form of the carved pyramid and its summit-graves — a marriage of a real Greek literary tradition about Thrace with a real Thracian monument, made in the present and not handed down from antiquity. As a piece of Thracian cult, Tatul is a rock-sanctuary with tombs cut into its top, honoring the dead and turned toward the sun. As the tomb of Orpheus, it is a legend — a beautiful one, alive and consequential in the way that legends bound to real stones can be, but a legend, and to be told as such. The grave at the summit held someone the Thracians honored. That this someone was Orpheus is a thing the modern day has wished onto the rock, not a thing the rock or any ancient source confirms.

Excavation, the sanctuaries of the range, and the modern pilgrimage

Tatul reaches the present through three channels, and they sort cleanly. There is the excavation — the recovery of the dressed pyramid, the summit-tombs, the deep shaft, the clay altars and the votive material, the dating of the cult into the late Bronze Age and the tracing of its use across millennia. This is the firm ground, the work of Ovcharov’s campaigns and of the discipline that reads a worked rock for its history. There is the place of Tatul within the study of the Thracian rock-sanctuaries of the Rhodope — the recognition that the eastern range is a country of such monuments, cut heights and rock-halls and altars, of which Tatul, with its unique carved pyramid and its open graves, is among the most striking; the same archaeologist’s labor at Perperikon a short way off binds the two into one Thracian sacred landscape, the largest and the strangest of the worked rocks of the range. And there is the modern legend, the Orpheus tradition, which has made the sanctuary a destination and a name far beyond the village — handled here as what it is, a modern attribution and a popular pilgrimage, not a recovered fact of antiquity.

The sanctuary at Tatul, popularly named Orpheus’ Sanctuary, near Momchilgrad in the eastern Rhodope. Klearchos Kapoutsis, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The rock will not settle which of its honored dead, if any, the later Greeks remembered as their singer; the question lies on the far side of a silence the Thracians never broke in writing. What the stone does carry is plainer and older than the legend laid over it. A height in the eastern Rhodope was quarried into the shape of a pyramid; its summit was cut to hold the dead and to face the sun; for thousands of years people climbed the carved steps to it and left their offerings on the rock. The sanctuary at Tatul is that worked height, and the singer’s grave is a story the living have told about it — the two now so wound together that to climb the rock is to meet both at once, the cut stone of the Thracians and the song the Greeks gave to their mountains.

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