Unique mausoleum from the ancient city of Chersonesos found in Crimea

A sophisticated stone architectural complex has been unearthed in the area of ​​the ancient Greek city of Chersonesos, which existed between the 5th centuries BC. C. and XIV d. C. on the territory of present-day Sevastopol (Crimea, Russia), reports the website of the Chersonesos historical and archaeological park.

The upper part of the building was an exedra, or ‘meeting room with seats’, in ancient Greek, while the lower part of the building housed a mausoleum, according to a team of archaeologists from the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Academy Russian Science.
archeo.ru

«This combination of funerary and public buildings is unique and has no analogues in the world. At the moment, the discovered exedra has been dismantled, work will be carried out to restore it. Now researchers are actively studying the lower part of the structure, the funerary, to preserve this archaeological complex in the future and, together with others, to later install it on the new site of the historical and archaeological park,” said the head of the mission. , Sergei Solovyov.

«The exedra was built on a funerary structure: a crypt or mausoleum. Furthermore, it is a multi-chambered crypt. There are at least four chambers, two of which are sarcophagi dug into rock. The central burial represents a cremation place made up of eight lead urns and one bronze, all of them filled with the ashes of the buried. And the rest of the chambers contain burials carried out according to the inhumation rite, that is, they contain 10 remains of human skeletons,” the scientist explained.
archeo.ru

The researchers explain this difference by the gender of those buried. The men were buried in the center, while the remains of women were found in the side chambers, where a large amount of jewelry, plates, glass containers, as well as decorative elements of women’s clothing were found.
archeo.ru

Until recently, the archaeological site was hidden under water, as it lies three meters below the water table. Hence, the extraction pumps do not stop working during the more than two years that the excavations are carried out at the site.

This large-scale research is «the largest in Russia and even in the world. For two and a half years, we have excavated an area of ​​85,000 square meters, found nearly 4 million artifacts and more than 1,500 archaeological complexes” from different periods, Soloviov said. With RT

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