199: The Bulgarian Giant

It all started with finding the jug shown below during a street excavation...

Archaeologists in Bulgaria have discovered the remains of what they have described as a “huge skeleton” in downtown Varna, a city on the shores of the Black Sea whose rich culture and civilizations spans some 7,000 years.

A Sofia News Agency reports that the skeleton was found in what was once the ancient city of Odessos, a trading post established by the Greeks towards the end of the 7th century BC. Odessos was a mixed community made up of Ionian Greeks and the Thracian tribes (Getae, Krobyzoi, Terizi). Later it was controlled by the Thracians, Macedonians, and then Romans. The Roman city, Odessus, covered 47 hectares in present-day central Varna and had prominent public baths, Thermae, erected in the late 2nd century AD, now the largest Roman remains in Bulgaria.

Researchers have said that initial analyses suggest the skeleton belongs to a man who lived in the late 4 th or early 5 th century AD, a time when Odessus was an early Christian center. Archaeologists in Bulgaria have discovered the remains of what they have described as a “huge skeleton” in downtown Varna, a city on the shores of the Black Sea whose rich culture and civilizations spans some 7,000 years.

Valeri Yotov, who is part of the team carrying out excavations there, is reported as telling local news websites that the size of the bones is “impressive” and that they belonged to “a very tall man”. However, Yotov would not reveal the exact height of the skeleton.

Bulgarian archaeologists work at newly found giant skeleton at the main street in the downtown of the Black sea town of Varna, east of the capital Sofia, Tuesday, March, 17, 2015 Bulgarian archaeologists have made an interesting find while performing rescue excavations of the ancient Greek city of Odessos under what is now the modern city of Varna, Bulgaria, on the shores of the Black Sea.While digging out the base of a recently discovered section of the ancient Ossesos fortress wall, archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a man who has been described by the head of the project, Dr. Valeri Yotov, as "a very tall man with impressive bones though no estimation of the man's height in life has been released.The skeleton was found to be buried partially beneath the wall at a depth indicating a pit that was some 3 meters deep at the time of his death.

Thee tall man’s skeleton was buried in a construction ditch partly under the fortress wall of the Greek and Roman ancient city of Odessos has been discovered in the downtown of Bulgaria’s Varna. It has been found near the St. Nikolay Church. At a distance of just 20 meters a 5th century earthen jar was discovered in January 2015 by construction workers, a discovery that triggered the rescue excavations of the so called Varna Largo, the passenger zone on the central Knyaz Boris I Boulevard. Last week, the Varna archaeologists found remains of the Odessos fortress wall, fragments of another earthen jar and a hand mill from late Antiquity.

“As we started to uncover the ancient fortress wall, we started asking ourselves a lot of questions, and, of course, we had to keep digging to reach the wall’s foundations. That’s how we stumbled upon the skeleton,” explains Yotov.

Archaeologists found out that the body was originally buried in a depth of three metres. Since graves of such depth are very rare, they assume that the pit must have been dug up as a construction ditch at the time when Odessos’s fortress wall was being erected. Further evidence of a burial, according to the Varna archaeologists, is that the tall man’s skeleton lies in an east-west position, and his hands are placed on his waist. While archaeologists find nothing exceptional about their find, Varna people have already begun to speculate about the origins of the skeleton. Some have even been quick to describe the ancient man as a representative of the “long extinct race of Atlantis giants”.

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In the end... not that skeleton in this story has a measuring rod beside the skeleton. We are still the only site in the world to show something from a extremely tall human being with a measuring device beside it. Because not one photo old or new has EVER had a measuring device beside it or something to show contextual size (eg a spade, or even the finders hand). Even we would have given up believing had we not found our first bone. Not that we disbelieve the stories, it's just that the finders are hoaxers, or plain stupid that they provide no context, a ruler, a tape, even an iphone to scale (not even Doutre).... We have.