Is Novak Djokovic-endorsed Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids the 8th world wonder – or just a massive hoax?
- The Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids was supposedly built by an advanced prehistoric civilisation and has a mystical energy that can heal the ills of mere mortals
- Novak Djokovic’s endorsement has supercharged visitor numbers, making it a hub for vaccine sceptics in a country with one of Europe’s lowest vaccination rates
The burly construction worker’s eyes shine with evangelical zeal as he gestures towards the triangular hill looming over the small rural town of Visoko in Bosnia and tells us: “In 10 years’ time, more people will visit here than the Great Pyramid of Egypt.”
A migrant labourer in Australia, he has flown home to take his elderly father from North Macedonia to a place called the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids in the hope of curing him of his chronic lung disease.
“You can feel the positive energy around you, and my father’s already breathing more easily,” he insists, before launching into an unrelated rant about how Vladimir Putin is the hero of the world and Nato plotted the fall of Yugoslavia.
Like thousands of other daily visitors from the Balkans and around the world, this slightly scary man believes Visoko is a source of miracles, home to an early civilisation that communed with aliens and a cosmic hub where disease and sickness can be banished.
The transformation of Visoko – population 10,000 – from a drab and unremarkable riverside town into a modern-day Lourdes, and Bosnia’s leading tourist attraction, over the past two decades is as extraordinary as it is controversial.
It began in 2005, when Sam Osmanagich, a swashbuckling United States-based Bosnian Serb who dresses in the style of Indiana Jones, declared that the vaguely Toblerone-shaped hills surrounding Visoko were, in fact, the oldest and largest man-made pyramids on Earth.
