Dacian Giants

Story by Warren Singh-Bartlett

Alien spaceships crashing at Roswell. The Holy Grail buried under a Scottish chapel. Lost cities of gold in the Amazon rainforest. A valley inhabited by immortals in the Himalayas. Everyone loves a tale, the taller the better. Romania, no slouch in supernatural stakes itself, has one of the tallest: it was once home to a race of giants.

You might see nothing unusual about that. After all, didn’t giants also build that Causeway in Ireland and the temples of Tiwanaku in Bolivia? And wasn’t it a person of shall we say, a larger size, who was brought down by David’s stone?

Scratch about a bit and there’s barely a culture in the world that doesn’t have a legendary belief in giant beings of some kind or another. Romania’s claim, though, is slightly different. Believers not only claim that a race of giants once inhabited these lands but that their skeletons have been found to prove it and not just once, either.

Argedava – Graphical Reenactment by Radu Oltean

The most famous story dates back to the 1940’s, when a giant skull, at least twice the normal size, was unearthed at an archaeological dig at the ancient Dacian city of Argedava in south-eastern Romania.

One of the excavators, a local man called Ionita Florea, claimed that when the discovery was made, the archaeologists in charge sent the local workers home and continued to dig in secrecy. He maintains that by the time the dig ended, over 80 supersized skeletons, many of the complete, had been unearthed before being bundled into trucks and carried off, never to be seen again.

That this story is still told today is testimony to two things. Firstly, to the power of the Internet to resurrect rumour and hearsay, no matter how old and secondly, to the implication of cover-up and as we all know, these post-Dan Brown days, nothing captures the popular imagination quite like a conspiracy theory. Just ask the Illuminati.

Argedava wasn’t the only time evidence of giants has been uncovered in Romania. Villagers planting an orchard in Scaieni, apparently unearthed another graveyard, as well as strange metal statues a metre in length. Once again, the finds were taken away by archaeologists. Meanwhile, the Bucegi Mountains are said to be full of traces of a giant race, including huge rock thrones carved into inaccessible hill sides. Most sensationally, the mountains are said to hide a network of tunnels and caves full of massive tables and chairs that are at least 50,000 years old. This is where the giants lived and some say, hid their treasures. Naturally, the tunnels are protected by a mysterious energy force that keeps people out and they are linked to similar networks under the Sphinx, Baghdad and Tibet’s Mount Kailash as well as to two secret worlds under the Gobi Plateau and Antarctica.

Bucegi Sphinx, by Mickael UNG

The Bucegi Mountain story may have its roots in a far older belief.  According to the Greek historian, Herodotus, the Dacians, Romania’s original inhabitants, who were wiped out by the Romans, believed that their god, Zalmoxis, lived in a cave in the mountains with his immortal followers. It’s possible that over time the legend of the god became the legend of a race of giants and if so, it wouldn’t be the first time that an old story has developed from even more ancient, half-remembered beliefs. It’s also possible that Herodotus made the whole story up. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened either, for why else would the man once called the ‘Father of History’ be better known today as the ‘Father of Lies’?