They discovered the secret of the “door of the underworld” which killed anyone who passed through it | the Chronicle

After thousands of years, scientists discovered the secret of the cave in Turkey that the Romans considered to be the “door to hell“since all the animals that entered died and it was used as a place of sacrifice to the gods.

He is 2200 years old and it is located in a city called Hierapolis, in the ancient Phrygian region, now Turkey. It was a well-known place in the Eastern Roman Empire, as it was the temple that guarded the entrance to the underworld. As the researchers found, castrated priests guided the animals to be sacrificed through the “Pluto Gate” or “Plutonium” and they died instantly.

They say that millennia later, the cave continues to have the same level of toxicity thanks to a concentrated cloud of carbon dioxide. “This space is filled with vapor so foggy and dense that you can barely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death. I threw sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell“said the Greek historian and philosopher Estrabón (64 a. C. – 24 dC).

The secret of the “door to hell”

Archaeologists from the University of Salento discovered in 2011 that the small cave was located on a crevice that released deadly volcanic carbon dioxide.. But, continuing Strabo’s story, what caught the attention of visitors was that although the priests approached the place, they appeared to be sheltered from the mist.

Why are the priests not dead? In 2018, there was a crack in the cave, so scholars visited. Hardy pfanz, a volcanologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, analyzed the air and found the answer.

In the first place, he assured that it is a high concentration of carbon dioxide varying with the time of day. During the day, the deadly poison dissipated into the air, but at night it accumulated creating a thick layer just above the soil surface.

For this reason, the priests performed the rites at night and above all, they kept away from the poisonous gases which flooded the ground and killed the animals instantly.

The secrets of the mystery of the “door to hell”