Magura Cave

Worth a detour

Dancers, hunters, masked figures and a reading of the year drawn on the walls with fossilised bat droppings, over a span from the late Stone Age to the early Iron Age. Be clear before you drive out here: the painted gallery has been sealed since 2019 and what you are shown is a projection. Take a jacket — it is about 12 °C inside all year.

Story

Background

Magura runs about two and a half kilometres into the hill above Rabisha, in halls big enough to swallow a church — one chamber is over two hundred metres long — with a stalagmite called the Fallen Pine lying eleven metres across the floor and a column over twenty metres high. It is cold, wet and slippery, the lighting is permanent, and the guided circuit takes an hour and comes out on the far side of the hill from where you went in.

The cave's reputation rests on more than seven hundred drawings made not with pigment but with bat guano, applied to the rock and fossilised there. They run from the late Stone Age to the early Iron Age and show hunting, dancing, figures in masks, animals and geometric marks; one panel is read as a solar calendar, though that interpretation belongs to the site rather than to any consensus.

And you cannot see them. The drawings gallery, some three hundred and seventy-five metres in, was placed under an administrative closure in 2019 after mould linked to visitors, lighting and a shifted microclimate began to attack the images; an iron grille now closes it to everyone but researchers and film crews. A projection in another hall stands in for it, and there is a photographic exhibition at the entrance. Much of the marketing has not caught up with this, which is why people arrive expecting otherwise. Also true and less advertised: a winery has been ageing sparkling wine in one of the galleries for about half a century, and still is.