Today the Turkish province called Antalya seems to have no connection to the ancient Greeks, however, about 80 kilometers southwest of the province hides Mount Yanartaş or Mount Chimera, a landscape replete with rocks that have been burning in flames relentlessly for millennia and could be evidence that Homer was not only a great Greek poet but a historian.
The mountain that spits fire
In present-day Turkey, there is a mountain called Yanartaş or Chimera, whose rocks have been spitting fire for millennia without a break. The flames emanating from the rock surface are distributed over an area of 5,000 square meters and seem to have a seasonal character, as they have been seen burning with greater impetus during the winter season, perhaps due to the accumulation of groundwater pressure and changes in atmospheric pressure.
Researchers believe that the fire is fueled by methane, not from the decomposition of organic matter, but by a chemical reaction generated inside the rocks. This type of gas is known as abiotic methane and precisely the source of Mount Chimera is the largest ever found.
The first written references to the burning mountain date back 2,500 years, so it is believed that these flames have been burning for much longer than we can imagine and it is not known when they will go out.
A beast called Chimera
Greek stories have given life to the major basis of Western culture, for proof of this we have Plato’s Dialogues which are the cornerstone of modern philosophy. But besides Plato, other authors of Ancient Greece have a great impact on today’s culture.
Homer is one of them, for, with his two epic epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, he has left an invaluable cultural capital. However, it has been questioned whether the works of the Greek aedo are limited to fictional poems or whether they go beyond fiction and he played the role of a historian rather than a poet. Scholars still do not agree, because although there is a great predominance of belief that his stories are the product of his imagination, there are clues in the landscapes of Ancient Greece that could tell us that not everything is fiction.
The Iliad tells the epic story of the Trojan War which, according to Homer, was fought between 1194 and 1184 B.C. But in another of its passages, we can find the story of a terrible beast called Chimera, who had the head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and the body of a goat, who lived in Lycia and died at the hands of Bellerophon. According to the accounts in The Iliad, Chimera breathed fiery and horrible flames of fire.
“Bellerophon, setting out under the auspices of the gods, reached the vast Lycia and the stream of the Janthus: the king received him with kindness, lodged him for nine days, and had as many oxen slaughtered; but, on the appearance for the tenth time of the rosy-fingered Aurora, he questioned him and wanted to see the note that he brought him from his son-in-law Preto. And when he had the fateful note, he ordered Bellerophon to, first of all, kill the ineluctable Chimera, a being of nature not human, but divine, with the head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and the body of a goat, which breathed fiery and horrible flames; and he killed it, encouraged by divine indications”. (Homer. The Iliad VI.145).
Coincidence or fiction?
Strangely enough, in what used to be Lycia, there is a burning mountain that spits flames of fire outwards, it is the aforementioned Mount Yanartaş. The same famous Greek historian, Herodotus, was the one who described the ancient region of Lycia in these territories, and furthermore, he said that its inhabitants came from the island of Crete. Another strange coincidence is that Homer explains in his Iliad that the Cretans came to the aid of the Trojans in this region.
However, the coincidences were not noticed by modern historians until the Royal Navy Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort became aware of the matter in 1811. In charge of the expedition on the coast of these territories, Beaufort spent two years mapping the area and it was there that he discovered many ruins of Ancient Greece on the southern coast of Anatolia.
Text courtesy of Ecoosfera
