I admit defeat. After spending weeks thinking about how best to approach this article, I just decided to embrace my cynicism completely. You see, an interesting organization called the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation claims that some of the oldest and biggest pyramids on the planet can be found near this unassuming Bosnian town, Visoko. Are these claim true? Well, you can make up your mind about that by the end of this article, but a quick Google search will tell you that such claims are, most likely, not so true. Shocker, I know…
When I first arrived at Visoko after a very short bus ride from Sarajevo, my first impression was that this beautiful city did not need any absurd claims to attract tourists, at all. Visoko is one of the greener and neat little towns that I visited in the entire Balkan peninsula.
Admittedly, the second thing I noticed was just how this particular mountain looked like a pyramid from a certain angle. Almost as if it is an ancient pyramid covered in a forest after many millennia of neglect. Yes, surely, this must be a pyramid. It is not as if there are any other mountains on Earth that look like a pyramid, from certain angles. No sir!
I decided to quickly check out the main attractions in the city center before exploring the Bosnian Pyramids. This made me realize that the minaret of Šerefudin’s White Mosque is as quirky as it gets. While the center is indeed home to a few other similar attractions, that is admittedly not why I was there. Most Bosnian towns are full to the brim with unique looking holy sites and a mix of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Yugoslav structures. Not many of them supposedly have pyramids.
However, before visiting the area known for its pyramid related attractions, the so called Ravne 2, I made sure to visit Buregdžinica Zvrk to eat some of the best burek in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The lovely gentleman that operates this place goes above and beyond in friendliness and professionalism and he certainly knows how to serve an exceptional potato filled pie. These come topped with a type of kaymack, if I am not mistaken, which made them even more delectable than usual.
After a quick walk around town and an even quicker meal, I made my way to the general vicinity of Ravne 2. It is extremely easy to get to this place as all across the town you will find signs telling you where the nearest pyramid-related attraction is.
These are the sort of signs that I am talking about. I took this particular photograph inside the Ravne 2 area, so it does not actually direct you there, but you can clearly see the other similarly mysterious points of interest around Visoko.
Ravne 2 is likely the best maintained and most interesting manmade park in BiH, and possibly in the entire region. You did not think that I would waste an entire article as well as your precious time just to mock some pseudoscientific claims, right? I call a spade a spade, and while the pyramid hoax is not for me, the narrative that was created around this hoax and the sort of developments it led to resulted in some fascinating places to visit for us travellers.
I must say, if you do not mind the outright bizarre naming scheme of the things that you see in this park, you will have a great time. For example, the road ahead was not an inspirational one, alas, here we are with such an uninspired name.
While not inspirational, this was quite an enjoyable walk. You only really hear some birds chirping as you make your way through a small patch of forest atop a hill in peace, which is a rarity these days.
However, there is much more to this park than taking some nice walks in the forest. Much more. You see, this is no ordinary park. This is a well curated manmade park with a purpose. It brings together a ton of pseudoscientific stuff from around the globe, stuff that often claims to have certain powers. There are circles that grant your wishes if you walk around them a specific number of times, there are structures like these that seemingly have some sort of energy-related properties.
There are some random gimmicks like a smaller pyramid with lovey-dovey terms written on all of its sides. Well, in hindsight, I suppose it is true that Visoko has at least one pyramid.
There is even a magic forest, which is presumably so beautiful that it is magical. Who am I kidding… It has exhibitions on fairies and even more magical circles that grant some sort of stuff to you, if you do the rituals as they are described in nearby plaques. A lot of interesting stuff really, stuff being the only term I can write without my language becoming too flowery in the rudest way possible.
Even the toilets in this place are quite something. I knew deep down that the narrative of this hoax had to be connected to aliens or some lost civilizations in one way or another. This sign was a sign that I was most likely correct in my assumption.
Now, while I can go ahead and mock every single weird thing that you can see in this park, I will refrain from doing so. That is because, while I am not sure if it is the most beautiful European park, Ravne 2 is an exceptionally beautiful and well-maintained park that is completely free to visit. It is more worthy of praise, not criticism. You will not find a better organized, cleaner, and more interesting green space than this in BiH. This park alone took about two hours of my time, and I only regret not spending more of it here.
This really is a peaceful place. At the end of the day, it does not matter whether it is peaceful because of its exceptional maintenance and gorgeous nature, or because of the mysterious properties of the surrounding ‘pyramids’ and the underground tunnels beneath the park, as the creators of the park would have you believe. None of these conversations matter when you are simply enjoying something beautiful. While I do not like the idea of less than transparent foundations creating cult-like followings, the fact that volunteers of this particular foundation help keep this place in its pristine condition make it very difficult to judge them too harshly. Maybe this was the reason behind the creation and “gifting” of this park to the general public as the founder of Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Foundation, Dr Sam Osmanagich, wrote in an introductory text by the entrance to Ravne 2. Once again, regardless of whether this place is a publicity stunt or not, it is well worth your time.
In fact, this park was so worth visiting that I ended up doing something I did not initially want to do. I paid to see what Ravne Tunnels offered, to listen to the narrative behind the pyramid hoax myself. You need to pay 20 BAM to enter these tunnels, and you will meet a representative of the Foundation shortly. The guide goes through what makes these tunnels so special and explains just how the Bosnian ‘pyramids’ are certainly not a hoax. As you may imagine, this was truly a bizarre experience, the best of its kind. This short tour had everything that I imagined, and more. Apparently, some lost civilization built these tunnels using concrete that is five times better than the modern stuff some 30000 years ago. For some reason, yet another lost civilization filled these tunnels at a much later date. And now, just as any reasonable species would do, we, the so called third civilization, are (very) slowly re-opening the tunnels in an effort to figure out the secrets of the first civilization.
At some point in our tour, a young gentleman asked the reason behind the second civilization filling these tunnels in the first place. Our tour guide confidently said that they will get to the bottom of this and find out the sort of treasure or horrors that await us beneath the Pyramid of the Sun, in about ten years. Shocked at their confidence, at that point, I decided that I had to come back to Visoko in a decade or so to find out how they developed this story further. Funny enough, that was not even the highlight of this tour, not by a long shot. The highlight was being introduced to supposedly ceramic rocks like these that, clearly, must have been created by intelligent hands. These are apparently found on top of underground currents with special properties. Around a particularly big rock that was most definitely not brough there by the Foundation, our guide said that she will now show us scientific proof of what we have been talking about for a while. Then, she calmly and confidently asked us to hover our hands right above the rock. She said that we would soon feel ‘something.’ After about five minutes of silence a few people said that they did not feel anything, and then we all just moved on in complete silence for a minute or two. I am sure that on that particular day science simply decided to make itself scarce.
I was quite glad to find out that this already interesting guided tour was not all that was included with our entry ticket. After the tour comes to an end, you are given a chance to spend some more time in the tunnels to meditate in its special air, which is cleaner than the air on the ground level due to a ton of mysterious reasons. I believe that this is the case only because this cave is one of the few places in BiH where smoking is truly banned, but perhaps that is just the cynic in me speaking. Regardless, these tunnels do have excellent air quality, and so when I was given the chance to explore them freely, I happily obliged. After a few short minutes, I ran into a younger gent who happened to be meditating there, and best of all, he had his own instruments to make some meditative music. Now, I am not sure whether he left that place more relaxed than ever or not, but I sure did, mostly thanks to his skilled use of those ancient looking instruments. The tunes he played and the vocals he made added a ton to the overall atmosphere, in a way that I cannot really put into words here.
Unfortunately, it was high time that I returned to Sarajevo, as there are not too many buses that connect these two cities, even on a weekday. That is why, I quickly made my way back to the city center, where I came across this monument in a hurry. The signs around it suggested that it was something occult as well, though I cannot be sure as I did not stop long enough to take a closer look at it.
In fact, I could not even wait around on this bridge to take a closer look at the fascinating Bosna River. I have been to its spring after all, so it was only natural for me to want to see how it looks downstream.
I was rushing because I originally wanted to take the train back to Sarajevo, and not the bus. However, I was surprised to find out that the train was running late, by an undeterminable time. That simply would not do. So having felt a bit defeated, I went back to the local bus stop and took the same bus I used in the morning back to the Bosnian capital.
At the end, do I actually think that BiH has some of the oldest pyramids in existence? No. Does one have to believe that make a visit to Visoko? Certainly not. Whether these pyramid looking mountains, which are probably flatirons, are pyramids or not is irrelevant to whether Visoko is worth a visit or not. In fact, if they are the hoax that I think they are, it makes it an all the more interesting destination in my humble opinion. How many of you can say that you visited the site of a massive hoax? Not many, I believe. Moreover, as I attempted to show in this piece of mine, the infrastructure that was built around this narrative are all very much worth a visit on their own rights. All of these quirky little sites provide a unique experience, which is arguably what most of us travellers are mostly looking.