8,000 to 9,000 years ago, on a horseshoe bend of the Danube, people built the first planned settlement in Europe. Trapezoidal houses, every one constructed to a precise geometric pattern of 60-degree segments. Limestone clay floors mixed with ash and dung, hardened like concrete. A central hearth in each house, and at the back of each, a small shrine carved from massive river stones. In the middle of each floor, a shallow circular depression that archaeologists have read as an altar.
Every house faced the same direction. East across the river, toward a sacred volcanic mountain called Trescovăț. About 78% of them mirrored the trapezoidal silhouette of the mountain in their own shape. One archaeologist has read the entire layout of the settlement as a map of the Sun's movement, with each house functioning as a small Sun shrine. One archaeologist has read the entire layout of the settlement as a map of the Sun's movement, with each house functioning as a small Sun shrine, and the human figure embedded in the floor plan as an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun itself.
On the summer solstice morning, the Sun rises twice above Trescovăț. First above the flattened top of the mountain. Then again from behind a rocky outcropping near the summit.Then again from behind a rocky outcropping near the summit. Geospatial analysis has confirmed that the phenomenon was visible from the original settlement at the time it was inhabited, with the axial tilt the sky had then.
The Lepenski Vir double sunrise is the only one in the world known to fall on the Summer Solstice itself, and the only one around which a Mesolithic settlement was deliberately designed.
A double sunrise phenomenon also occurs in Rimetea in Transylvania in July, but the Lepenski Vir double sunrise is the only one in the world known to fall on the Summer Solstice itself, and the only one around which a Mesolithic settlement was deliberately designed.
In one of the houses, a skeleton was found buried in Siddhasana, a seated yogic posture. He died 8,000 years ago, and most likely left his body consciously, in Mahasamadhi. The skeleton is still in the Lepenski Vir Museum, where you will see it. He was not the only one. Yoga and meditation were alive on these riverbanks 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, carried west from the region of Kailash and Manasarovar. Kailash and Manasarovar. The Saptarishis, the seven sages, walked out into the world to plant the seeds of this knowing in different directions; one of them came through Central Asia, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, and the trace of his passage is still preserved in oral tradition along this path, even where the archaeology has been lost.
The Lepenski Vir settlement predates Stonehenge. It predates the pyramids. It comes from a time before writing and before the wheel. The Balkan Peninsula is considered, in modern archaeology, the cradle of old European culture. Some researchers have traced the linguistic, mythological, and spiritual archetypes of Europe back to this region, carried later in oral myth to Greece, where they were written down for the first time and the gods were lifted to the snowy peaks of Olympus.
We built this whole journey around the solstice morning. On 21 June, the longest day of the year and the International Day of Yoga, we will watch the Sun rise twice from the grounds of Lepenski Vir, in an open field near the museum. We will honor the ancestors who practiced what we still practice, in the place they practiced it.
The 3 days before it are how we get there. We climb Trescovăț itself, the mountain the whole settlement was built to face. We walk through Topolnița Cave in neoprene suits. We move by boat through the most spectacular section of the Iron Gates Danube Gorges. We trek the gorges of Cheile Nerei.
The Summer Solstice is, in the yogic tradition, the moment when the Sun turns south and the celestial body becomes most receptive to inner work. The body and the place are aligned. The 3 days before the sunrise are how we prepare to meet that morning.
That's the journey.
