NEKROMANTEION

20 minutes by car from Parga, here is a very interesting site that retraces the journey of the believers who came to meet the dead. The main sanctuary and the rooms date from the end of the 4th century. The Nekromanteion was burned by the Romans in 167 BC. In the 18th century, Christians built the monastery of Saint-Jean-Baptiste on top of the ancient ruins.

Visit. The Nekromanteion was a sanctuary surrounded by a polygonal wall. You can get a clear idea of the pilgrims' itinerary within the sanctuary by going to the entrance of the northern corridor. To do this, it is necessary to cross the central courtyard bordered by the priests' houses and rooms where treasures were stored. The pilgrim would take this northern corridor plunged into darkness and be led by a priest to one of the special rooms to the left of the corridor. He stayed there for two days, during which he had to undergo the test of silence, fasting and darkness. At the end of this stage, it was purified in another special chamber. He could then use the east corridor at the entrance of which he threw a stone on the right side to ward off the spell. The pile of stones illustrating this repeated practice is clearly visible. The pilgrim, weakened, disgusted and hungry by the ritual sacrifice of a sheep that he had to make in this corridor, then reached the entrance of the labyrinth. The labyrinth led the pilgrim to the central courtyard, which was the place where the dead appeared.

Below, a staircase leads down to a 15-arch crypt, which was identified as the palace of Hades and Persephone in the Hellenistic period and as a place of worship in the 7th century. The explanation of these apparitions of the dead to the pilgrim is quite simple. The walls surrounding the sanctuary were thick enough (3.30 m) to allow priests to pass through, allowing them to move around without being seen. They then secretly operated a huge machine made of large bronze gear wheels and a kind of human skull that the pilgrim thought was the figure of the deceased. The believer's state of physical and mental fatigue, reinforced by the games of machinery and the cries of priests lurking in the shadows, ensured the success of the enterprise. The belief in these apparitions was finally perpetuated in the following way: the pilgrim left the sanctuary by a different route from the one by which he had come. He had to remain silent about what he had seen or heard or risk being accused of impiety towards the gods. The worst crime among the Greeks...