Chichén Itzá

We were finally getting to see it, Chichen Itza, arguably the most famous and intact city of the ancient Mayans.  Rising early we ate a quick breakfast of fruit, tamale, scrambled eggs, and hot chocolate, packed our clothes, piled into the car and left our cute hotel in Vallodolid.  At last after a forty minute drive, we got to the parking lot at Chichen Itza, and headed into the entrance passing by the many local people hoping to sell knickknacks and sombreros.

At the ticket booth my excitement was bubbling over, so we hired a guide whose name was Eric, and excitedly headed to the original city.   (The reason why I say the original city is because what we now know as Chichen Itza was built in two different stages, one during the Classic Period and the other during the Post Classic Period, the latter which was influenced by another Native American Tribe knows as the Toltecs.) ​​

Our first stop was a building known as the observatory.  We learned that the center of the observatory was the shape of a circle and had four main windows representing the four cardinal directions, North, South, East and West.  On the inside of the circular shaped building, there was a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor in which the Mayan’s observed the cosmos.   As shown in the drawing on the left, two of the windows are aligned with the sun during both the fall and spring equinox. ​

The other four corners of the building are matched up with the summer and winter solstices, with the exception of the northwest corner which matches up with Venus when the planet reaches it’s farthest point in our sky located in the northwest.  This happens only once every eight years. (Venus was an important planet to the Mayans because they believed it was the sun’s brother as it was seen in the sky following the sun’s path in the morning or in the evening, hence our name the morning or evening star.) ​

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One last incredible thing about the observatory is that when you look at the observatory from above, and replace the circular section of the building with a square, and draw lines from the corners of the square to the four corners of the terrace, you will see the blue prints for the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, which is the main temple at Chichen Itza.  I think that is the coolest thing ever that most of the Mayans main buildings are related to celestial objects. ​

From there we went to a nice shady spot under a tree and started talking about the Mayan calendar.  The Mayans had different calendars of circular rings inside bigger circular rings of longer cycles.  The Mayan calendar had one cycle of 260 days inside  a longer cycle of 365 days.  The 365 day cycle consisted of 18 months of 20 days and five nameless days which were considered extremely unlucky.  Even though that seems complicated, there’s still more to the Mayan calendar.

 Every 52 years, the calendar of 365 days and 260 days coincide and start at the same time which creates what is known as the Long Calendar.  (Fifty two years is also the cycle of Pleiades, a grouping of starts that the Mayan also observed.)  Finally, the Mayans believed that the earth was created on August 11th 3114 BC, over 5000 years ago.   

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Then approximately every 5000 years, all of the cycles coincide at the same point and the whole entire cycle begins again.  The last completion of this cycle happened in 2012 which made a portion of the public think that the world was going to come to an end.  The reason why this confusion happened was because the Mayans believed that their calendar cycle was cyclical, so that it starts at one point, and eventually comes to an end, and then circles around to repeat itself again. ​

This is quite different from the western societies belief in a linear understanding of time where there is a defined start and end, which made certain people think the world was coming to an end when the Mayan calendar was ending in 2012, not realizing it was also a new beginning. Clearly this did not happen.  Today there are sadly no actual Mayan calendars that exist but we have a tremendous amount of knowledge about how the calendar worked and may have looked like.

We then walked to the next location which is called the Nunnery, (based upon the conquistadors original impression of the building), a three story, 21 room palace.   The main entrance of the palace was a steep three story staircase leading up to the top floor of the building.  

I couldn’t believe that this was a real palace, so of course, I started snapping photos.  My goal for this trip to Chichen Itza was to try to get photos without random tourists in the frame and I think I did a pretty good job of doing that.  Realizing that I was now lagging behind, I ran excitedly to my family. ​​

They were looking at a long wall with geometric pattern of repeating X’s on the bottom, and the top portion of the wall had beautiful carvings.  An even more impressive piece of artwork was the palace’s tiny temple dedicated to Chaak, the Mayan’s god of rain.  The lintel – top of the building – had beautiful and ornate carvings of Chaak.  ​​

​In the artwork, Chaak is depicted with square eyes and upside down question mark nose and an open mouth with teeth.  Flanking Chaak were carvings of animals who the Mayans believed held up the four corners of the sky, the animals were the bee, shell, tortoise, and armadillo.  All in all it was a beautiful building to look at. ​​​

From the temple, Eric our guide, led us around and into the courtyard of the palace.  Three of the rooms surrounding the courtyard were bedrooms and the fourth was an intricate entrance to the main part of the house.  (Bedrooms were the only rooms Mayans had in their house because they spent most of their day outside doing different activities.)  ​​

The entrance had an intricate carving of the owners name written above the door in hieroglyphics and the remains of a massive sculpted jaguar.  The door appeared to be the jaguars mouth with “teeth” surrounding the door and more teeth and a tongue on the bottom.  Looking at this building I realized that I would love to see these buildings during  the peak of the city, all painted and clean.

Moving on from the palace we saw the Platform of Venus which was a flat topped building where dances occurred during ceremonies.  There we checked out a small ball court which had sloping sides leading up to vertical stone hoops.  (More will be described on ball courts later on.)  ​​

Then it was time to move to the “newer” city influenced by the Toltec.  Our first stop was a 7 meter four sided temple with snake heads on the side of each stairwell.  We learned that the temple was built to cover the entrance to a cave.  An archaeologist discovered a passageway from the top of the temple going straight/vertically down into the ground.  ​

The archaeologists kept on digging and found the entrance to a secret cave.  The cave held seven skeletons who were thought to belong to high priests since they were buried with precious objects and jade face masks, which were often worn by priests.  The cave is not open to the public but it must look really cool.  ​

Our next stop was the “Big Mama”, the main temple at Chichen Itza which you have most likely seen photographed, also known as the Temple of the Plumed or Feathered Serpent.   This was by far one of the best temples I have seen and is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World, not because of it’s size but because of it’s design and engineering.  As mentioned earlier, the temple has the same blue print as the observatory.  The four sides are facing the cardinal directions of North, South, East, West, but not exactly. ​

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The temple is spun 22 degrees clockwise.  At first archaeologists thought it was a mistake in the planning of the building that was amplified when the Mayans actually built the temple.  But….it was not a mistake.  The reason why is that when the sun sets during the spring and fall equinox, the sun’s rays shine through the platforms lighting up a side of the stairs, making a snake pattern only seen during the equinoxes.  There are a few other symbolic meanings hidden on temple, almost all astronomically related as shown below.  ​

1) There are 91 steps on each of the four sides of the pyramid, making a total of 364 plus an addition single step platform which takes you to the top of the temple, making a total of 365 steps representing 365 days of the solar year.

2) On either side of the stairs there are nine levels of terraces making a total of 18 which represents the total number of months in the Mayan solar calendar.  

3) There are 26 panels per each side of the stairway, add two of them together and you get 52 the number of years in the long count calendar.  ​

4) On top of the temple there are five stone shapes per side representing the 20 days within each month
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5) These five shapes also represent the five nameless days which also equals 365 days or a solar year.

The Temple of the Plumed Serpent is made up of carved limestone blocks, stands about 30 meters tall, and used to be painted red.  A very steep staircase is flanked by smooth stone sides which on the north facing side has two serpent heads at the bottom and a square building with four entrances on the top.  Oh and one more cool thing - if you stand in front of any of the four staircases and clap hard, you will hear the sound of a quetzal, (the sacred bird of the Mayans who represents heaven), reverberating back to you.

Wow, the temple is so incredibly magnificent and beautiful.  The symmetry enhances the temple making it look much more magnificent, tall, and pretty, and while only two of the four sides are fully restored, the temple still looks amazing.  I could easily spend the whole day looking at it, except for the extreme heat beating down from the sun making it a scorching day.  ​

Next stop was the Temple of the Warriors, the temple where human sacrifices were performed.  I was surprised to hear that the Classic Period Mayans did not sacrifice humans, but instead made blood sacrifices by piercing different parts of their body.  When the Toltecs came and built the new city of Chichen Itza they brought the idea of human sacrifice with them.  This temple earned its name due to the intricate warriors carved on each of the pillars that used to hold up the roof.   At the top of this beautiful temple, you can see a statue of the messenger of the gods which is where the Mayans used to put offerings.  To the right of the temple, there are over 600 columns that used to support a Palapa (thatched roof) which was thought to be the market place for the Mayans. 

From there we went to another platform of Venus that was incredible to look at since some of the original paint was still there and the carvings were in great condition.  The carving had the face of a priest inside the mouth of a jaguar with a snakes tongue surrounded by quetzal feathers, which represents that gods had the power over the earth, the underworld, and the heavens.

The human face represents earth, the jaguar and snake represent the underworld, and the quetzal represents the heavens.   Right next to the platform to venus is the Temple of the Skulls, named after the time a rival city took over Chichen Itza, decapitated the leaders, and put their heads on spikes on top of the temple to force the other Mayans of the city to accept them as their leaders.  Pretty gruesome.

Our last stop on the tour was the ancient ball court.  This ball court was the biggest in the Mayan world, around 96.5 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 7 meter high walls with  rings on the top. It was a really impressive place situated in an “I” shaped stadium with the court where the stem of the “I” is.  The rulers of the competing towns sat on either end of the stadium.

One end had a rare depiction of the god Kukulkhan with a long beard and white skin which is only seen in four other places in the Mayan world.  The wealthy people would be on top of the walls looking down at the ball court, and the commoners at the base and on top of the “I” in front of the rulers. ​

One thing that yet again amazed me about Mayan architecture was that the walls were angled slightly towards one another, so that when someone shout something at one end, it echoes only once at the other end.  This worked as an early microphone system, amplifying the persons voice so everyone could hear.  Sadly the rules of the ball game have been lost over time, but what we do know is that the players can only hit the ball with their knees, hips, elbows and shoulders.

The goal of the game was to pass the ball to the captain who then has to knock it through the hoop.  A funny mistake that an archaeologist made during the reconstruction was making the wall exactly vertical instead of slanted inwards like the rest of the wall.  Since they reconstructed it wrong, the archaeologist had to redo the wall and angle it slightly inwards as was originally constructed for the “microphone” effect in order to complete the proper version of the ball court.  I’d hate to be that archaeologist! ​

Hot and sweaty, we thanked our guide for the tour and headed to the Sacred Cenote.  On the way we talked about how an archaeologist along with several other people stole all the precious offerings from the Sacred Cenote and supposedly blocked up the water passage making the water green.  While it is now considered dirty it is still incredibly beautiful to look at.  After our incredibly informative day, we took in our last views of Chichen Itza and headed off to our next destination, the city of Merida. ​