The awe of centuries-old Nan Madol on Pohnpei
Updated
Australia Network's Pacific Correspondent, Sean Dorney, has just returned from one of the most mystifying places in the Pacific - the ruins of the temple city of Nan Madol on Pohnpei island in the Federated States of Micronesia.
Between the 12th and 16th centuries, Nan Madol may have housed some 5,000 people on a maze of artificial islands constructed over a reef. We join Sean as he heads off by motor canoe with a Pohnpeian guide Sochky Stampson to travel to the ruins.
Presenter: Sean Dorney, Australia Network's Pacific Correspondent
Speaker: Sochky Stampson, Pohnpeian guide; Fr Francis Hezel, head of Micronesian Seminar; Emmanuel Mori, President of the Federated States of Micronesia
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STAMPSON: We're going to the ruins, Nan Madol.
DORNEY: In the thirty plus years I have been covering the Pacific there is one place I have often hankered to go and investigate. It's an intriguing place called Nan Madol - which translated means "Places in Between". That's a reference to the fact that Nan Madol is an ancient complex of manmade islands separated by canals and built on a reef on the south east coast of Pohnpei, the island that hosts the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Archaeologists say Nan Madol probably reached its zenith in about the 12th Century AD. Approaching it from the sea is the recommended route to appreciate what it must have been.
STAMPSON: We are in Nan Madol. This is Nan Madol. And Nan Madol is divided in two parts - upper and lower. This upper side, where we are, belongs to the royalty.
DORNEY: The royal people?
STAMPSON: Yes.
DORNEY: And this big structure that we're coming up to here, what was it?
STAMPSON: Ah, this is a temple. And it's, it's the place where they buried the chief. It's a burial tomb - inside.
HEZEL: I thought of it as a fort. I guess everybody does when they first see it. You know, these gigantic basaltic rocks laid on top of one another.
DORNEY: Fr Francis Hezel runs Micronesia's premier research institute, the Micronesian Seminar.
HEZEL: When you listen or take note of the oral traditions you begin to see that there's a story that Ohlosipha and Ohlosopha, two brothers, founded this place. They came from the west - some place or other. Their origin is uncertain. They were looking for a site to start a religious, a religious shrine and Nan Madol probably began as that, it probably began as a religious site, a temple, if you want.
STAMPSON: Nan Madol - it's about 200 acres. In this 200 acres there are about 108 islands. Each island they have names and purposes. They have place for food storage, temple, clinic island, assembly hall, different kinds of purposes.
DORNEY: Many of these manmade islands have been overgrown by mangroves.
STAMPSON: They use the basalt rock on the outside and they use the coral inside. They fill the inside. If you look through the wall you can see the coral inside.
HEZEL: We know a little bit about what was done there. We know there was a sacred eel and it was fed the entrails of certain animals. We know that there was a sacred burial ground there and we know that the priests, this line of priests became priest-emperors or priest-chiefs and they extended their rule all over the island for several generations. But they died out in the sixteen hundreds, interestingly enough just a short time before the first Westerner came to Pohnpei.
DORNEY: At one end of Nan Madol there is a pool next to the islet that was the hospital.
STAMPSON: It's a clinic. And you see the pool afront us it's a place where when the people are cured by their sickness then they do a final rinse in there.
DORNEY: In that pool?
STAMPSON: In that pool.
DORNEY: The question is how did these Pacific Islanders transport the rocks and the huge basalt beams here?
STAMPSON: The older people told us that by oohnahnee. I don't have any English word to translate this local word, "oohnahnee". But it's similar to levitation.
HEZEL: Well, the islanders say that they flew. They say that the Pohnpeins used magic on them.
DORNEY: The mystery even stumps the President of the Federated States of Micronesia, Emmanuel Mori.
MORI: Even I, I've been wondering how did they manage to carry all those, you know, rocks! They're thousands of pounds. And I just, I just can't! Somebody has to tell us how did they move those huge rocks from wherever they manufactured them to that place?
DORNEY: The most impressive structure in the complex remains the temple. There's a small fee, three US dollars a head, to go inside.
GATEKEEPER: Thank you.
DORNEY: Thanks very much.
DORNEY: My guide, Sochky Stampson, told me he has shown people like George Lucas, co-creator of the Indiana Jones character and movies, over these ruins - the focal point of which is the central burial chamber.
DORNEY: So how many did you say they found in here?
STAMPSON: They found 16 skeletons in there.
DORNEY: Sixteen?
STAMPSON: Yeah.
DORNEY: It was a tomb reserved solely for the priest emperors.
DORNEY: No women were ever buried here?
STAMPSON: Yeah, no women buried here. It's on the other side.
DORNEY: So it appears that this was a major religious site for something like 400 years.
STAMPSON: Some of the people, the Pohnpeian, they haven't even seen this place.
DORNEY: Why do you think that is?
STAMPSON: Some they very, they very superstitious and they're afraid to come to this place.
DORNEY: But many outsiders have been fascinated.
STAMPSON: Like George Lucas. He came here before - maybe six years ago and I take him around, brought him here to see this place.
DORNEY: And do you think he got some ideas for future movies from it?
STAMPSON: Ur, I don't know, maybe [Laughs].
DORNEY: Another mystery is what brought about Nan Madol's demise.
HEZEL: The island story is that Isohkelekel - he's a local hero, now he would have been a demi-god, his father was a deity, his mother was a Pohnpeian, he went to Katau which could be understood as either Kosrae, the island of Kosrae, or someplace up in the heavens and came back with 333 men in canoes and they made an assault on Nan Madol, overcame the Saudeleurs - that's what the chiefs were called - and took over the island.
DORNEY: But Isohkelekel apparently ended up taking his own life.
STAMPSON: This is the island where they have a pool inside where one of the chiefs called Isohkelekel, his name. He looked into the pool and see his hair getting grey and later on he killed himself.
DORNEY: Because he...?
STAMPSON: Because he thought he was old.
DORNEY: Too old?
STAMPSON: Too old, yeah!
