The epic wars fought in the summer of 2026 all across social media over the historical accuracy of Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey should have taught us something. Myths and poetry are often inspired by historical events and places. They are sometimes backed by archaeological finds. But they are neither history, nor archaeology. They live in a separate realm; mistaking a millennia-old poem and a 21st century film for a history textbook is… beside the point.

A place in one of Bulgaria's mountains embodies this clash between myth, history, memories,archaeology and modern tourism pretty well.

Tatul could be any one of the small hamlets scattered through the barren hills of the Eastern Rhodope, the kind of place you pass through without a second glance while driving through the region. A closer look tells a different story. About 300 metres south of the village a rocky hill rises sharply, crowned by one of the strangest megalithic structures the Thracians ever built.

At the top, a monolithic rock 4.5 metres high has been carved into the shape of a truncated pyramid. One side holds a semi-circular niche overhanging a sarcophagus-like stone tomb. At the summit, a second rectangular basin nearly two metres long has been hollowed out of the rock, its resemblance to a sarcophagus striking. Reaching it means climbing a series of narrow, steep and vertiginous steps cut directly into the stone, a climb that feels deliberately built to test the visitor before they reach the top.

Despite its dramatic appearance, the shrine has seen little sustained research, with excavations in the 1970s and later in the 2000s. What emerged points to a long history. The sanctuary was established somewhere between the 18th and 11th centuries BC – if the later date is true, its builders could have heard or even participated in a military conflict we now know as the Trojan War. The shrine was active throughout the 1st millennium BC, an age where iron became the main metal for weapons and tools, and Greeks started settling along the coast of Thrace, establishing trade routes. After Alexander the Great's conquest that globalised the ancient Mediterranean world, in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BC, the shrine's most sacred buildings were fortified with a stone wall. One of these, called by archaeologists Building 1, ranks as Tatul's most impressive structure after the pyramid itself. It was probably a heroon, a shrine to a deified ancestor. Even now, only a fraction of the site has been properly studied, and much of what surrounds the pyramid remains unexplored.

None of this archaeology is what brought Tatul its fame. That came from a name: Orpheus, the mythical Thracian musician whose songs were said to move every living creature and whose journey into the underworld has echoed through European culture for millennia. Ancient Greek myths describe him as a poet and prophet as much as a musician, a central figure in the Orphic mysteries, a body of religious teaching that spread far beyond Thrace in antiquity. His biographers, however, all lived centuries after he was supposed to have died, and their accounts of his birth, life and death rarely agree with one another.

Two episodes from his legend have proved unusually durable. The first tells of his descent into the underworld. According to ancient authors, Orpheus was so devastated by the death of his wife Eurydice that he descended into the Kingdom of the Dead and persuaded Hades and Persephone, through music alone, to release her. They agreed. On one condition: Orpheus had to walk ahead of Eurydice and resist looking back until they both reached daylight. He looked back anyway, and lost her a second time.

Orpheus's own death is told with just as much variation. Some myths have him torn apart by a group of women, others blame the Maenads of Dionysus, who killed him wither with their bare hands or with stones. Ancient writers disagree on where his remains ended up too. Aeschylus placed them in Pieria and Pausanias at the foot of Mount Olympus in Dion. Orpheus's severed head and lyre, meanwhile, were said to have drifted down the Maritsa River and across the sea to the island of Lesbos, where they continued to prophesy to those who sought them out.

Tatul is far away from all the places mentioned by ancient Greek authors. The Bulgarian site entered the story in the 1970s, when Bulgarian historians first floated the idea that Orpheus's grave might lie here rather than in Greece. The theory owed much to the late historian Aleksandar Fol (1933-2006), who argued that Orpheus was a real historical figure, a Thracian who lived in the 2nd millennium BC and reshaped the religious beliefs of his people. In Fol's account, the Thracians had worshipped an elemental Dionysus, a god of ecstasy and darkness bound up with both nature and the human soul, until Orpheus introduced them to Apollo, a bright, spiritual deity who offered his followers life after death. This new faith was reserved for the few, an aristocratic circle of initiates who alone could hope for immortality, while the wider population continued in older ways.

Applied to Tatul in the mid-2000s, the theory found circumstantial support in the site itself. Nothing else in the Balkans resembles this sepulchral complex, and its scale and effort suggest it was built for someone of real importance, someone whose status demanded a monument unlike any other in the region. The uppermost sarcophagus looks towards the sky and the sun, fitting for a devotee of the sun god Apollo. One version of the myth even holds that the Maenads killed Orpheus specifically because he had abandoned Dionysus for Apollo, a detail that supporters of the Tatul theory point to as further confirmation.

A discovery in 2005 added fuel to the idea. Villagers reported finding a statuette near the shrine depicting a nude Greco-Roman deity holding a lyre, dated to the 1st or 2nd century AD. Some researchers read it as Apollo, others as a rare depiction of Orpheus himself. The disagreement over the statuette has never really been settled. Three years earlier, in 2002, Greek archaeologists had announced a possible Orphean oracle site on Lesbos, reviving international interest in the whole question of where, if anywhere, Orpheus was actually buried, and giving Bulgarian historians a rival claim to argue against.

Circumstantial evidence, tourist curiosity and no small amount of media enthusiasm did the rest. Tatul is now marketed as the Tomb of Orpheus and sits on every Rhodope tourist route, complete with a paved path, benches and signposts guiding visitors to the summit. Coach parties and independent travellers alike arrive through the summer months, drawn less by the archaeology than by the promise of standing where a legendary figure may or may not have been laid to rest.

The one disappointment is practical rather than mythical: the metal roof erected to protect the excavated structures does little justice to a site that, ancient and modern myths aside, remains one of the more remarkable ancient monuments in the region, a place where Thracians shaped raw rock into something that has outlasted every story ever told about it.