Chichen Itza

---

Trying to feel how it is to be a Maya. It's just amazing to know that a population like this still exists nowadays!

After a few hours, we arrived to Chichen Itza, a Mayan temple surrounded by soldiers' shelter, game field and astronomy. There were something like 50 000 Mayans living there with all the rituals and sacrifices between the 11th the 15th century if I have a good memory.

That day was fucking hot, and we also had rain for 10 minutes (the only moment we had rain since we came!). I could discovered that their belief in their god (the sun) was really strong, it was mainly related to the weather. As they need to feed the population, there was a lot of pressure on agriculture and so they pray and made sacrifices to have rain.

The temple is just so huge and so well-built! They were the first to do astronomy. According to the sculptures on the wall, it is supposed that players winning the puktapuk game (don't know how to write it...) (a ball game where you can't touch the hard ball with your hand, and you have to put it in a basket, which pretty high though!), are sacrificed in that way, we cut their head, and the blood is spread on the ground, looking like snake shapes (which is a symbol of fertility). What a story! I love these kind of stories!!!

---

Photos

another way to sacrifice
I don't remember exactly, there's another type of sacrifice: 2 hearts from 2 different person are extracted, and we can see there heart beating. as you can see there's something related to the falcon (and the jaguar)

another way to sacrifice
the leopard

the snake symbol
there s so much to say about this temple, it also represents the calendar, they could show the months, the days, the solstice in this one thing!

the players
you should loose if you wanna stay alive!