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| 0425 Chichén Itzá - Aerial view |
Posted on 21.12.2012, 14.08.2015
What postcard would be more apropriate for today, December 21, 2012 (when, according to the mayan calendar, the fourth world reached the end of its 13th b'ak'tun, and the Great Cycle of the Long Count reached completion), than the one with Chichén Itzá? "Chichen Itzá was at one time not only the greatest and most powerful city in Yucatan, but it was a sacred city as well, a center of pilgrimage to which people flocked from every part of the peninsula and from foreign countries also to make offerings of gold, incense, copper, precious stones and human victims", is written in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.
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| 1817 Chichén Itzá - The Castle seen from the Temple of the Warriors |
"The city owed its reputation for sanctity to its cenote, 1 or natural well, which was believed to be inhabited by the gods and the spirits of the illustrious dead. It is a great cup-shaped depression in the earth with perpendicular walls, about seventy feet down to the surface of the water and about one hundred and seventy feet across. The sacred well served no utilitarian purpose; the city obtained its water from another more convenient cenote and several artificial wells."
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