Nan Madol

Nan Madol is a ruined stone city built on a coral reef flat off the eastern shore of Pohnpei, an island in the western Pacific that belongs to the Federated States of Micronesia. Its core is a group of 92 artificial islets of basalt and coral fill, separated by tidal canals, which gave it the modern nickname "Venice of the Pacific". It was the ceremonial and political centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, the first government to unite the whole island, until about 1628. Its name is usually translated as "within the intervals", a reference to the waterways between the islets.

Activity at the site goes back to the first or second century AD, and the building of islets had begun by the eighth or ninth century. Radiocarbon dates place the start of the distinctive megalithic construction at around 1180 to 1200, when massive columns of basalt were brought from a volcanic plug on the far side of the island. How they were moved is not known, and little about the construction can be verified. A Pohnpeian tradition held that builders from Leluh on the neighbouring island of Kosrae came to Pohnpei to raise Nan Madol, but radiocarbon dating shows that Nan Madol is the older site, so influence more likely ran the other way.

Pohnpeian legend gives a different account. It tells of twin sorcerers, Olisihpa and Olosohpa, who arrived by canoe from a western land to build an altar to a god of agriculture, and who raised the great stones with the help of a flying dragon. When Olisihpa died, his brother became the first Saudeleur, or ruler.

The Saudeleur governed an island population estimated at around 25,000 from Nan Madol. In Pohnpeian tradition their rule began gently but grew harsher over the generations, with ever heavier demands for tribute of breadfruit, yams, taro and fish. The city itself was an elite enclave of perhaps no more than 1,000 residents, and possibly fewer than half that. Archaeologists suggest that obliging rival chiefs to live there, rather than in their home districts, helped the rulers keep watch on them. The north-eastern sector, Madol Powe, was a mortuary district of 58 islets, mostly home to priests, while the walled royal tomb islet of Nandauwas is said to have been built for the first Saudeleur. Because the islets had no fresh water or farmland, food and water had to be ferried in by canoe from the main island.

The dynasty fell, around 1628, to Isokelekel, a warrior who in tradition came from Kosrae; at least thirteen differing versions of the conflict have been published, and in most of them the Saudeleur had offended the thunder god Nahn Sapwe. Isokelekel took the title Nahnmwarki and ruled from Nan Madol, inaugurating a more decentralised system of chiefs that survives on Pohnpei. His successors, however, had to fetch their own food and water, and this is thought to be one reason why they eventually returned to their home districts; a fall in population is another suggested cause. The site was gradually deserted.

Pohnpei passed through a succession of foreign rulers. Spain claimed the Caroline Islands as part of the Spanish East Indies by 1886, and after the Spanish–American War sold them in 1899 to the German Empire. The Polish ethnographer John Stanislaw Kubary had made the first detailed description of the ruins in 1874. Japan occupied the island during World War I and governed it afterwards as a League of Nations mandate. In 1945 it passed to the United States, which administered it from 1947 as part of a UN trust territory until the Federated States of Micronesia became independent in 1986.

The ruins became a national historical landmark in 1985. Underwater surveys from the 1970s to 2013 looked for legendary sunken cities offshore and found only fallen building stones and natural coral formations. Claims linking the site to the imagined lost continent of Mu are regarded as pseudoscience, and Pacific archaeologists have criticised recent television claims about its age as insulting to the Pohnpeians whose ancestors built it.

In 2016 UNESCO inscribed Nan Madol as a World Heritage Site and immediately added it to the List of World Heritage in Danger, because silt building up in its canals was encouraging overgrowth and undermining the stone structures.