Kokino Observatory: Archaeology, Landscape and Interpreting Prehistoric Skies

On a volcanic summit in the hills of north-eastern North Macedonia, a cluster of split boulders, seat-like rock features and Bronze Age pottery has become a meeting point, and at times a point of disagreement, between archaeologists and astronomers. The Kokino observatory, as the site is popularly known, was identified in 2001 by an archaeologist from the museum in nearby Kumanovo, and its investigators argue that notches on the eastern horizon were used to follow the rising sun and moon. Others accept the prehistoric finds but question whether the alignments were intended. On our small group Balkans tour, the group crosses from Serbia into North Macedonia on Day 10 and visits Kokino with a local guide on the way to Skopje.

Why the Kokino observatory matters on a Balkans route

Much of a journey through the Balkans is a reading of empires: Roman palaces and roads, Byzantine churches, Ottoman bridges and mosques, Venetian walls on the Adriatic. The route-wide guide to the Balkans History Tour follows those layers from Dubrovnik to Kotor. Kokino reaches much further back, to communities of the Bronze Age who left pottery, grinding stones and a casting mould on a bare hilltop many centuries before any of those empires existed.

It is also a lesson in how the past is interpreted. At Kokino three kinds of evidence sit side by side: the rock itself, with its seat-like features, notches and fissures; the objects recovered by excavation; and the measurements that link certain notches on the skyline to the rising points of the sun and moon. The rock and the finds are archaeological evidence. The measurements support an interpretation, made by the site’s investigators and debated by others. The tour page itself puts it carefully: “some say that Kokino is orientated in such a way as to show the equinoxes”. This article follows that distinction.

Tatićev Kamen: the hill and its setting

The site lies on the peak of a volcanic hill called Tatićev Kamen. According to the entry North Macedonia submitted to UNESCO’s Tentative List in 2009, it stands at an elevation of 1,013 metres, about 19 kilometres north-east of the town of Kumanovo, in the municipality of Staro Nagoričane. The same entry puts the wider archaeological site at about 30 hectares, with the area interpreted as an observatory covering about half a hectare on the summit.

The summit is divided into two platforms, “an upper and a lower one”, in the entry’s words. Gjore Cenev, who carried out the astronomical study of the site, describes the eastern platform as standing about 20 metres above the western one. On the lower, western side, four stone seats, which the investigators say were cut into the rock, face the upper platform and the eastern horizon beyond it. The UNESCO entry calls them “thrones”, and they are central to the astronomical interpretation of the site.

Discovery and the evidence from excavation

Cenev’s 2006 paper in the Publications of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade credits the find to Jovica Stankovski of the National Museum in Kumanovo, who came across the site in 2001. The UNESCO entry likewise dates the investigations to 2001. Cenev, of the planetarium of the Youth Cultural Centre (MKC) in Skopje, carried out the astronomical survey that turned an archaeological site into a proposed observatory.

The excavations produced the evidence that is least in dispute. The UNESCO entry lists “fragments of ceramic vessels”, “the mould for casting bronze axes and a pendant”, and twenty hand grinders found near one of the proposed ritual markers. Cenev, writing for the proceedings of International Astronomical Union Symposium 260, refers to a “great number of hand wheat mills” beneath the rock. The principal finds, according to the Tentative List entry, are displayed at the museum in Kumanovo.

On dating, the entry places human activity on the hill from the Bronze Age into the protohistoric period, “from 19th to 7th century BC”, and says the observatory was “formed 3900 years ago”. Cenev’s 2006 paper explains how that estimate developed: the pottery initially suggested an age of around 3,400 years, but excavations in 2005 pointed to “around 3800-4000 years” for objects found on the east side of the site. Grinding stones, pottery and a mould for metalwork describe a farming community that worked bronze, whatever else it did on the summit.

How the astronomical interpretation was made

The case for an observatory rests on surveying. Cenev’s 2006 paper describes measuring the positions of the notches on the eastern horizon from a central observation point with a laser total station, then converting each direction into a declination, the celestial coordinate that can be compared with the positions of the sun and moon, with a correction for atmospheric refraction. The notches whose directions matched the rising sun or moon on significant days were proposed as deliberate markers.

In that 2006 paper Cenev identified seven markers: three for the sun, at the summer and winter solstices and the equinoxes, and four for the extreme rising points of the moon. He found that the summer solstice marker matched the declination of the sun at the summer solstice in 1800 BC, and gave “1800 ± 50 years B.C.” as the date for all the markers. That date is worth reading closely, because it comes from the astronomy itself: the slow change in the angle of the earth’s axis means that the sun’s solstice rising point shifts very gradually over the centuries, and the date is the one at which the measured notch and the calculated sunrise agree.

The interpretation grew as the work continued. The 2009 Tentative List entry describes nine marker cuttings, three marking sunrise and six marking the rising of the full moon at its extreme positions. In his paper for IAU Symposium 260, Cenev went further. He argued that the lunar markers show knowledge of the moon’s 19-year cycle, and proposed a calendar of twelve ordinary years and seven leap years of thirteen months. He also described a harvest rite, in which sunrise on the day the harvest ended passed through a ritual marker and lit a single stone seat, which he read as a ceremony joining the sun with the community’s leader.

From the Tentative List to a withdrawn nomination

North Macedonia’s Cultural Heritage Protection Office placed the site under temporary protection on 13 November 2008, according to the Tentative List entry, and submitted that entry on 30 January 2009 as the “Archaeo-astronomical Site Kokino”, proposing criteria (i), (ii) and (iii). The entry presents Kokino as both an ancient observatory and a holy mountain.

A full nomination followed. The working document prepared for the World Heritage Committee’s 36th session in 2012 (WHC-12/36.COM/8B, dated 11 May 2012) lists Kokino, nominated under criteria (iii) and (iv), with the Advisory Body recommendation “N”, defined in that document as not recommended for inscription. The Committee’s decision 36 COM 8B.33 then records that the nomination was withdrawn at the request of the State Party. The 2009 entry is still published on UNESCO’s Tentative List, which means the site has been proposed for consideration but has not been inscribed as a World Heritage Site.

Why some specialists remain cautious

The debate over Kokino belongs to a wider argument within archaeoastronomy, the study of how past societies understood the sky. In 2010 ICOMOS and the International Astronomical Union published a joint Thematic Study on Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy, whose principal authors were Clive Ruggles and Michel Cotte, to help assess sites of this kind for World Heritage purposes. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union in 2016, Ruggles stressed that “the mere existence of astronomical alignments in ancient sites does not prove” that they mattered to the people who built and used them, and that establishing the credibility of an interpretation is crucial to judging its heritage value.

Juan Antonio Belmonte, in a chapter of the Springer Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy (2015), makes a related point about language. He notes that popular books and websites readily attach the label “observatory” to prehistoric monuments, including sites that were not built mainly to watch the sky, and that the word carries several meanings that are easily confused.

In the same paper, Ruggles notes that Kokino’s 2011 nomination rested largely on alignment evidence, and that the number of possible viewing points and markers could be explained by chance and selective use of data. Applied to Kokino, the questions are straightforward to state, if hard to settle. A rocky summit offers many boulders, fissures and possible viewing points, so some sightlines will meet a solar or lunar rising point whatever the intentions of the people who used the hill. The case for intention depends on showing which notches were cut or shaped, from which seat they were meant to be viewed, and how the finds around them relate to the days they are said to mark. None of this calls the Bronze Age activity on the hill into question. It is the step from finds and alignments to a working observatory with a calendar and a harvest rite that remains debated.

Did NASA rank Kokino as an ancient observatory?

Not as a scientific ranking. The 2009 Tentative List entry says that NASA “recognized” Kokino in 2005 under its “Timeless knowledge” project, which was NASA’s Sun-Earth Day 2005, an education programme for schools and the public on the theme “Ancient Observatories: Timeless Knowledge”. NASA’s poster for the programme lists Kokino as number 4 of 15 “Ancient Observatory Sites”, a numbered list rather than a ranking, which is probably where reports that Kokino “placed fourth on a NASA list” came from.

How much walking does the Kokino visit involve?

The tour page describes Kokino as “set high up in the mountains” and says a local guide gives an extensive tour, but it does not give a walking distance for the visit. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in 3 to 5 hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. If you would like to talk through what that means on this day, a Tour Specialist can go over it with you.

Will you see the sun line up with the markers?

Probably not on the day itself. The alignments the investigators describe concern sunrise and moonrise on particular days of the year, and the tour page does not say the visit is timed to a solstice or an equinox. What you will see are the rock features described as seats and markers, and the skyline they are said to frame, with a local guide, whose extensive tour, the tour page says, has a particular emphasis on local history.

What else does Day 10 of the tour include?

Day 10 heads south from Niš, the group’s base for three nights, which our article on Niš and its Roman, Ottoman and modern history covers in more depth. The tour page describes a visit to another Roman ruin with an overgrown mosaic floor and a lunch stop in Vranje before the group crosses into North Macedonia and visits Kokino. On the way into Skopje, the base for Days 10 and 11, the group stops to see the aqueduct on the outskirts of the city. On Day 12 the group leaves Skopje for Tetovo and a visit to the Arabati Baba Tekke, a Bektashi dervish lodge.

Reading the sky at Kokino

Kokino rewards a visitor who comes with questions rather than certainties. The pottery, grinding stones and casting mould show that people of the Bronze Age used this summit. The stone seats and horizon notches are there to be seen. Whether those notches were set out to follow the sun and moon through the year, as the site’s investigators argue, or whether some of the alignments are coincidences of a rocky skyline, as Ruggles cautions, is a question that the site itself invites you to weigh.

Kokino adds a prehistoric chapter to the story of North Macedonia that our history of the Balkans, Albania and North Macedonia takes up with the end of Roman rule. Later on the route, Lake Ohrid has prehistoric lakeside settlements of its own.

Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, mature travellers reach Kokino between the Roman sites of Serbia and the Ottoman streets of Skopje, with a local guide on the hill. It is a short stop on a long route, and a stop where the subject is not an empire but the sky above a Bronze Age hilltop.