While today's Bosnian papers are dominated by results of yesterday's elections, many readers will be skimming through to check for news of the pyramids. Bosnians have gone pyramid crazy ever since an amateur historian, Semir Osmanagic, claimed to have discovered three of them outside the town of Visoko.
Osmanagic, a 46-year-old Bosnian-American who runs a company making steel components in Houston, says they are 12,500 years old and that the biggest of the trio - which, it has to be said, looks suspiciously pyramid-like in shape - is one-third taller than Egypt's finest.
If this is true, then everything written about prehistoric, nomadic, berry-picking Europeans is wrong.
Bosnian archaeologists have denounced Osmanagic as a lunatic but he scoffs that his discovery is "going to change world history for
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tim judah visits the hills that cloak either an amazing find or an archaeological hoax |
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good". He claims the big one, which he has dubbed the "pyramid of the sun", is aligned with the points of the compass and that all three are connected by tunnels.
Locals confirm that there are indeed ancient tunnels under the hills and during the war of the early 1990s Bosnian soldiers reported that when shells hit the hill it would make an odd reverberating sound.
Digging began this summer and the slabs of stone unearthed certainly demand explanation. Meanwhile, Osmanagic has become a national celebrity and Bosnians descend on Visoko in their thousands, buying "Pharaoh Osmanagic" T-shirts and model pyramids at the many stalls.
In Sarajevo, Bosnian intellectuals believe their countrymen have grasped the story out of desperation for some good news. One senior diplomat takes a more charitable view: the whole affair, he says, is "a pyramid scheme without victims". 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 2, 2006
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