The frozen secrets of 20 million years of natural history have been brought under one roof at an award-winning museum on the Aegean island of Mytilini (or Lesvos), dedicated to a remarkable petrified forest.
The building in Sigri picked up top honours at the Eurosite 2001 awards held in Edinburgh in September in recognition of its role in protecting and showcasing one of Europe's most valuable natural history sites.
Sculpted from local grey lava, the building offers visitors the chance to wind their way through the millennia, uncovering the flora and fauna frozen in time and collected from the petrified forest.
The museum houses multi-coloured and -shaped fragments of the island's famous forest collected from the surrounding areas of Aloni and Bali. Tree trunks, up to seven metres long, some standing upright and others laying across the ground resembling supernatural columns of ancient temples, adorn a barren landscape.
Mytilini facing the west coast of Turkey has a turbulent history, falling in turn under the rule of ancient Persians and Athenians, then of Romans, Venetians, Bulgarians, Turks and Germans. Mytilini was also home of ancient Greek poetess Sappho. Yet besides human military or cultural influence, the isle was considerably moulded by millions of years of volcanic activity.
On location
On the west of the island lies the bare mountainous terrain which is home to the Petrified Forest, a remarkable natural phenomenon standing as evidence of a landscape's flora and fauna frozen in time. A lush sub-tropical forest was once covering this land, filled with sequoias, pines, oaks, palms, laurels, cinnamon plants and ferns dating from the Late Oligocene to Lower and Middle Miocene periods, which is when the Earth went through the intense activity that transformed it into what we see today.
The Petrified Forest was created by fierce volcanic eruptions which caused ash to cover all forms of life present and then, through a rare chemical reaction, to crystallize organisms molecule by molecule into stone. This kind of preservation gives scientists a unique look into the past, since along with tree trunks, roots, seeds, leaves and cones have been turned into stone, not to mention the highly important find of a petrified prehistoric elephant ancestor jaw.
It is therefore not surprising that the museum - housing natural imprints from the Mytilini forest as well as similar examples of petrified nature from around the world and info on the process of geological transformation - is a top research centre affiliated to many Greek universities. Its up-to-date information technology along with an audiovisual centre and library create great demand for the educational programmes on offer. Since the unofficial opening in 2000 there have already been 30,000 visitors.
Also used as a conference centre, the museum hosted the 2nd International European Geoparks convention at the beginning of October. Furthermore, the museum, supported by the European Union, undertakes excavations and related research in the wider area.
