The Necromanteion of Acheron

The door to Hades that turned out to hold parts of seven catapults

The ancient Greeks put a door to the underworld here in Epirus, where the Acheron, whose name was read as joyless, meets rivers whose names meant burning coals and lament. Herodotus says Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent envoys to this Oracle of the Dead to question the ghost of his wife Melissa, and Homer sends Odysseus down to Hades by way of it. The rite described for it is vivid: a meal of beans, pork, oysters and a narcotic, a descent through winding corridors and iron gates, and priests who seemed to rise and fly. In 1958 Sotirios Dakaris dug a building on the hill at Mesopotamos and identified it as the oracle, and for decades that was the story. Later study took it apart. The ruins are no older than the late 4th century BC, the hilltop does not fit the ancient descriptions, and the bronze fittings Dakaris took for parts of a flying crane came from at least seven catapults. It now looks like a fortified Hellenistic farmhouse, burned by the Romans in 167 BC.