Gone Medieval - Great Buildings of the Middle Ages

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

How did medieval builders create monuments that still leave us awestruck? How were vast cathedrals, temples and cities constructed and embellished?From Canterbury Cathedral and the palaces of Great Zimbabwe and Venice, to Cambodia's Angkor Wat, some of the greatest achievements of the middle ages depended on extraordinary stonemasons.Dr Eleanor Janega is joined by Simon Warrack to hear the inside stories of the exquisite craftsmanship behind these architectural wonders.MOREA Stonemason's SecretsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyMythbusting Medieval BuildingsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Watch Matt and Eleanor's new documentary The Rise of the Plantagenets by subscribing to History Hit. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here. So many of our greatest medieval buildings are made from stone. Norman cathedrals, hewn from Purbach marble. Venetian palazos founded upon layers of estrian limestone. An African capital named House of Stone, after its towering, dry stone walls. Each tells a different story, often ruined, sometimes restored. All are fragments of the civilizations that once flourished across Europe, Africa, and Asia. But behind every

stone lies the story of the stone masons who placed it there. Every carved block and every etched inscription offers a glimpse into the lives of the builders and craftsmen responsible for someone of the medieval world's most extraordinary monuments. From the soaring transeps of Canterbury Cathedral to the breathtaking temples of Angkor Watt, were journeying across the medieval world to uncover the stories behind its greatest buildings. How were these astonishing structures built?

What skills did it take to create them? And what can the stones themselves still tell us today? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, and this is Gone Medieval. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by expert stone mason Simon Warwick, whose new book, Monumental, Great Buildings of the World Through the Hands and Eyes of the Stone Mason, helps us to discover how the medieval world was built, one stone at a time. Well, Simon, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

I'm really excited to have you here today because I absolutely flew through this book. And I think that anyone who has an interest in great buildings is going to do the same. It's going to be wonderful to pick your brain. I suppose the best way to start, I think, is acknowledging the fact that you're an expert Stone Mason, which is unfortunately one of the coolest things in the world to be, that I'm never going to live up to anything that cool. You've worked on these incredible medieval buildings all over the world. You've worked in Europe, Africa, Venice, regardless of it.

say, at the Far East. I mean, what is it like being able to work on these buildings in so many different contexts, you know, they've been built hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. To me, it just seems to be this really gorgeous legacy that you're able to put your hands on. When you say you're an expert, Stone Mason, I think every Stone Mason that I can think of crosses their arms and goes, oh yeah, there's no such thing. Because the thing about being a Stanweson, as I hope came across in the early chapters of the book, is that there's no such thing as doing a good job. You do it right or you do it wrong.

And this all starts from doing a straight line. Now, if you do a straight line, as my teacher used to tell me endlessly, there's no such thing as a good straight line. So when I would say, oh, was that any good, he would go, how can it be any good? good, it's just right, and which is it supposed to be right or wrong. I'd take a careful nod to any stonemasons who may be listening when they hear me being called an expert stone mason, because I wonder if there's any such thing. And those rules go across cultures, across countries, and so on, because you've got to cut a straight line if a building is going to stay up. So we all work

to the same regulations, to the same rules, which are basically the rules of physics and gravity. And beauty comes into that, of course. But the building has to stay up. I think that's a pretty good place to start. And I mean, fundamentally, I guess it's testament to the fact that following those rules mean that these buildings have really stayed up for quite some time. I mean, I suppose you've been a part of the ongoing effort to do just that. When we're thinking about conservation, you know, and people training a stone mason still. You know, this is such an incredibly important thing to do, right? I mean, I think that in terms of our worldwide heritage, being able to see monumental buildings like this is just of tremendous import.

I think the most important advice that I was ever given was right at the beginning of my career, which again I mentioned, which was, I did actually study history at university, so I did have a vaguely academic background in that I kind of found myself at university like a lot of people did at that time and went through it and finished it. and while I was there, I actually spent a whole term in Venice, which was part of the course, and which was one of the main reasons for me applying to that course because it sounded like a good thing.

And while I was there, I saw people working on restoration of ancient buildings and working on stone, and I thought that's what I want to do. I want to also live in Venice and chip away on beautiful finials and flowers and live in Venice. So I asked them what to do, and I ended up being interviewed by the director of an institute called Ecromb, which is actually a part of UN, actually a part of UNESCO and the UN. And he said, well, you've got an academic background.

Now go and become a stonewason, because there are almost no academics who can wield a chisel. And there are very few stonewasons who have an academic background. And if you can put your foot in both those camps, you will be a conservative. and you will never want for work. And it was very sage advice, which being very young at the time I took. It's actually one of the things that I recommend to students now, because I've spoken with Mason's training masons on, for example, at the Canterbury Cathedral training yard.

And I just find it to be, it just must be impossibly rewarding, I suppose, is the thing. you know, when there are people like me who work on medieval history, but entirely within the academic confines, as it were. And, you know, I read about these things, I think about these things, I write about these things, but I don't get to actually build anything. You know, I think there's something so beautiful about actually being in this same sort of lineage. And I suppose that brings me to another question, which is, are there any masonry techniques that people in the Middle Ages are using that we're still using now? Is there a great difference in terms of the technology

that is being used when one is attempting masonry? Well, nearly all of them are still being used. I mean, there are now shortcuts, so there are machines, so we don't actually have to lift up five-ton blocks. We push a button and a machine lifts it up. But the hammer and the chisel are still used. The mallet, the drags for planing off. for surface, squares, compasses, the templates, doing the drawings.

The whole process is and can really only be similar. When I was actually training as a stunmiss now, I was at the Building Craft Training School, I remember going to the British Museum and wandering through the Egyptian department and seeing a cabinet where I thought, oh, they're doing some work there because, you know, they must be doing a hole. and I looked and I double-checked, and it was a cabinet which contained the tools that the ancient Egyptians were using,

and it was a mallet, and it was a chisel, a point chisel, a flat chisel, and what we call a Lewis, which is a lifting tool. So it's a three-pinned lifting tool, and the Egyptians use them to lift the blocks, the Romans used them, and we used them on Canterbury,

with absolutely no change, because one of the difficulties of lifting a very large block is that when you lower it into place, you can't have any ropes underneath it because you lower 15 tonnes onto a mortar and if there's two ropes underneath, you can't pull them out unless you come to a crafty solution.

And one of the solutions is making sure that you're only lifting equipment is fixed to the top bed. So basically you pick it up and lower it onto the mortar. But there are other tricks that they have. they will leave bosses sticking out from either side, so you can tie the ropes around those and then cut them off later. The Greeks use those.

They even cut slots underneath the block so that you could put the rope in the slot, lower it down, and then slide it out. So there were all sorts of different tricks, which, again, I can see in an instant, but I doubt that you could. That's part of the fun, and that's how appreciated it.

ancient monuments when you've actually worked on them, you can see the problem immediately, and then you immediately, your question is, okay, how do they get around that? And then you can see it, usually. And that again is across the world. One of the tricks that the Greeks used in Agrigento, for instance, when they're putting in, putting side by side an architrave, which is the line of blocks that sits on top of the columns, you have, you have to, you have to butt them up against each other very carefully. So they got a U-shaped slot in each of the sections which have to meet up against each other so that when they meet, the two blocks bump together, they form a very tight joint and then you can pull out the rope from the U-shaped slot. Do you see what I mean?

It means basically that on either end of the block, the rope is in a U-shaped slot. You fit them together, there's an invisible joint, and then you can pull out the rope. That technique was used by the ancient Greeks, and I found it on the 10th century temples in Cambodia. Obviously, it's not that somebody traveled across the world and told the Cambodians how to do it, or vice versa. It's that man faced with certain problems, comes to certain solutions, and they are inevitable and And that's why every Mason and archaeologist I know gets so utterly infuriated with the conspiracy theorists who say, we don't know how this is done. No, you don't know how this is done. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Oh, I'm trying to see up a while. Well, I wanted to talk about several of the buildings that you've weren't able to work on over time. And I suppose we both mentioned it briefly, but just a quick stop, I suppose. I suppose. Canterbury Cathedral, your friend and mine.

So can you tell us a little bit about when it was built and what we're looking at in terms of tools? Is it the same sort of base tools that we've been discussing this far? In terms of building, yes, absolutely. In terms of age, it's one of the cathedrals that took the longest to build because it started off as a very small church established by St. Augustine, who brought Christianity to Britain. so that would have been in about the 9th century, if I'm not mistaken. And then as it gradually grew in importance,

and as it grew in importance, so the monks would stick bits on. It became particularly important when one of the archbishops was martyred by the Vikings, not Thomas Abkhett, but one before him was martyred by the Vikings. And then they got lots of pilgrims and rubbed their hands and thought, jolly good, this means income. And so they extended the church. By first burning it down,

accidentally it called fire, so they were then able to extend it. And then when Thomas A Beckett got marty, then the whole thing took off exponentially. And so they had to build, extend it and extend it until eventually Henry VIII put a stop to it by dissolving the monosurbancially. By dissolving the monosurbanical So the last part of the cathedral is the west end, but it's one of the few cathedrals with actually four transets, not two, because the first two transets, which are the cross, were on the smaller church, and then when they built the nave longer, the transets were too small and in the wrong place, so they put bigger transets in the middle. So it's actually got two sets of transets and a tower over the middle. So it grew like a kind of bush with bits and pieces and

That's one of the reasons why it's so charming. It also grew on different levels, so it's got a crypt, which actually has windows because it's not completely underground. And then the altar and the area where Thomas Abeket's tomb and various other kings and princes are buried is upstairs. So there's all sorts of different levels inside the cathedral, which is also very pleasing. So basically it took about 600 years from start to where they stopped with the Reformation. but other cathedrals took a very short length of time. For instance, Salisbury took only about 32 years, which is a record for England. And it's also the same amount of time as it took to build Ankur Watt.

And both of those are fantastic achievements, quite extraordinary achievements, on the edge of we don't know how he did it. But the point then becomes we have to then work out how they did it, not because it's there. That's the proof that they did it and it's not difficult. So yeah, it's actually the short ones, the ones that were built in a short length of time, that are the really interesting ones. Firstly, in terms of technique, in terms of beauty, it's one style, Salisbury. So it's all the same style, so that's nice.

But there's something very kind of pleasing about Canterbury or even York, which have a variety of styles. And so as you walk through, you go from perpendicular to Romanesque to early English. There's a lot of variety. And that actually is, I think, makes Canterbury rather special. I'm afraid that I'm a partisan of the several forms of vernacular. For me, I want to see a bit of a soup. I want to see something that's been worked on extensively over and over again. And I like seeing the different bits and pieces of people's imaginations.

I find it quite charming. Well, that is exactly what our contribution was, because the thing that stone masons do is that they rather irresponsibly let us deal with the carvings. So when you're doing pinnacles, on the corner of each pinnacle, they very often have a face. whereas the middle of the pinnacle will have finials and flowers. On the corner there'll be a face. And it was pretty much our choice to put what we like. And I can tell you, and I could probably show you if we got to walk around,

there is an Elvis Presley. And there was an, I don't know if you remember a cartoon figure called Ante Cap. Really? Oh my gosh. With a little cigarette in his mouth. there's a portrait of one of the labourers who was called Bobby who was a scared of height so he always stayed on the ground so they carved a big head of his

pulling his tongue out and blowing a great big raspberry at the office of the Deanan chapter and he only saw it when they took down the scuffling and it's clearly him and that is actually maintaining and very ancient tradition which again you see all over the world. It's the jokes and the sort of are very often dirty jokes

that are all over the cathedrals and not just Christian cathedrals. I've seen little jokes in Ankhawatt that the stonewisons have left behind. Not quite as naughty as the German and the French ones. Well, speaking, we mentioned it a couple of times now. Can we talk a little bit about Angervat? So what is Angerwad and why was it built?

Ankerwatt for me, is the Sistine Chapel of stonewasonry. It's the last word, because it's not only huge, but it's also beautifully and sensitively carved. It's a place that grabs your heart, not least because it's not only beautiful, but in the faces of the carvings and the sculptures, you see the faces of the people that live in the city beside it,

who are the most charming and wonderful people that you could meet anywhere. So there is a link and they're real portraits done with real love and care. So there's something about that place that grabs your heart. But to describe it is complicated because when I say big, people go, yeah, okay, big. When I do lectures, I would clip it out of Google Earth and paste it onto where I was giving a lecture just so that you can say to people, okay, we're now standing in Columbia University or we're standing in the soaz in London and you could then see where it's stretched to and if you paste Ankhore what and I'm talking one temple

and I would include the moat which goes around it which is part of it if you put the bottom right hand corner this is London if you were to put the bottom right hand corner on the Tower of London the top left hand corner would be at the other end of ancient city of London in Fleet Street. Wow. So that's big. When I pasted it over Columbia, University in New York, I'd paste it literally over the front of the university and it's stretched all the way to the East River. So it's stretched all the way. It goes from the western edge of Central Park right to the East River. That's one temple. Good Lord. It's twice,

if not three times as big as the Vatican City, which makes it bigger than a country. So it's hugely impressive, but it's also very carefully and sensitively and beautifully carved. It's not overpowering. There are temples in India where you go there, and it's just this mass of wonderful carving, but you can't make head or tail of it.

Ankur has a rhythm and a storytelling. in its construction, which is almost easy to understand. I mean, when you look at the bas-reliefs, they're telling you a story. There's a reason for them telling you that story. You do need a guide to help you through it, but the story is right there, and you can see it, and you can see the people involved. So the central premise of the temple is these endless reliefs, which have basically played the same role as the stained glass windows in a Gothic cathedral. They would tell a story to a people, pilgrims, who probably couldn't read. So that was how they got to know about their culture and their religion.

At the same time, the temple reflected the court of the king, and the court of the king reflected the court of the gods. So the king being a man would surround himself by about several thousand, very beautiful, topless, women. It's what men do, especially stone masons. Yeah, I mean, that was a vision of heaven. But it's carved, I mean, I'm making it sound frivolous. It is carved with great sensitivity and beauty. And the carvings of the girls who are angels and guardians are a whole cross-section of society. So they go from princesses with wonderful crowns through the serving women,

Down to, on the edges of the temples, you'll see women simply in a sandpot, in a sarong, who would be cutting the grass, cutting the rice, even doing their own makeup. And it's a perfect cross-section of the society if you can take the time to look at them all, which means days and days of it. The most enchanting little group, which I saw, which I mentioned, the naughty carvings on the cathedrals, is a little group of three, Apsaras or Devartas and they've all smiling and they've got their arms

around each other and when you look carefully the middle one has got her arm round the left one's waist and is just tickling her boo I love it just in a sort of friendly flirty girly way and it's absolutely charming it's not naughty

it's just charming so the whole temple has a mixture of a very powerful Hindu imagery just the creation image the churning of the sea of milk the Battle of Lanka where Rama goes across the ocean to find his wife, Sita, who's been captured by Ravana in Sri Lanka. There's the Battle of Kurukshattra where the two cousins fight.

It's all there. And all of it has a political reason for being there, which is very, very interesting. That's my interpretation anyway, because the king himself, who was called Suryovamand II, was actually not the legitimate heir. He was a cousin. And he managed to defeat his cousin in battle

and take the throne by killing his uncle. And that story is reflected in the Ramayana and the Battle of Kurokshetra, when two cousins fight. One cousin defeats the other cousin and peace prevails on someone. So guess what? That's the first relief you see.

Surprise. When you go through the temple. Like all of the kings who say they are there by divine right, regardless of the nation, regardless of the country, they use art and architecture to reinforce their claim to greatness. And interestingly, 300 years later, after the collapse of the Khmer Empire, when it came back in the 16th-17th century, the king, who was by that time Buddhist, used Ankhawat and what his ancestors had done in order to reinforce his claim to the throne, even though they were Hindu and he was Buddhist. So it just shows how important art and architecture are in establishing your position and power. Listen, a really great piece of architecture is a really great piece of architecture.

It sort of doesn't matter, I think, too. Yeah, well, we all know that politics likes to use monuments for establishing their place in history, though some of them do better monuments than others. Let's leave it there. Well, you mentioned already that Agarwatt, this incredibly huge and detailed. I think that, for me, it's the detail of Agarwatt that really sticks out even after we consider the size of it. is built in only 37 years. How on, I mean, that just seems like an incredible achievement. You know, it's, yeah, I'm very impressed that they've done that in Salisbury as well,

but Salisbury is not as big. Let's, let's be entirely honest. How on earth did they go about doing that? That is what I found so fascinating. And, yeah, when I play that game in my head, which is when I eventually shed this mortal coil and will I get a chance to go back and have a look? and that's one of the first places I'll go back to and have a look at to see exactly how they did it. And I think I've got a pretty good idea.

Basically, they're just very organized. They built Anquat on the plane, and the waters come down from the hills, and so they were able to use those waters to firstly fertilize the whole of the floodplains, along with the water from the lake, which rose and fall due to a complex year. geographical phenomenon which I weren't going to. But basically they could get three harvests a year. Now that means they got rich, and that means they could build cities and build temples to them, their gods and to themselves.

So how do they do it? Well, one of the best ways to move stone is on water, on canals. It's very difficult to drag stones across the earth, or even buffalo carts. you only have the dry season to do that. That would have been the same in England. Just to go back to Canterbury, all of the stone of Canterbury is from France. So it was easier to put stone into a boat in Normandy and take it to Canterbury than it was to put it onto a buffalo cart in Bath, which was probably the nearest decent sand limestone.

The same issues were faced by the Masons again. Now putting it on water, they built Kemparker. huge canals in Cambodia, one directly north to the mountains, one end of the mountain, and one to the east to the other end of the mountain. And there there are recently discovered, but there's lots more to discover, huge quarries. Most of them are now under the rice fields, and nobody's going to dig them up because, but they are at the height, at the end of these canals. So there would have been thousands of people quarrying, putting those stones into the canals and sending them down to Angkor.

And it would have probably been almost like a river of stone on bamboo rafts. And when I mentioned how big the temple was and I said it was inside a moat, that moat is square. and that has a building region, which means you can unload the stone on four sides, and you've got plenty of space to store it in, because if you're unloading what was at the height, probably around 200 blocks a day, then you need space and coordination just to stack them,

and then you need people to take them down and to work them and put them onto the temple. So you do need a lot of space, and they calculated that well, and they had the space, and they had the water that would lead from the quarry to the unloading areas. So logistically, it's feasible. I mean, it's obviously possible because it's there. But that's pretty much certainly how they did it.

They would have probably had elephants pulling the rafts, but buffaloes probably would have done the job as well, because on water, it doesn't take that much to pull it down a canal. It's just an incredible achievement in terms of logistics and problem solving as well, which I think is a really interesting thing. You know, we tend to see the actual result. We see the building. We see the things that people have done. But there are all these ineffable things that go into making something like this that we have to simply imagine, which is quite interesting, I think. It's an astonishing feat of coordination. It would have involved. a lot of people. It's unlikely that it was slavery, as I think that's now pretending to be revealed

across all cultures, many cultures. It's more likely that they had a kind of tithe, which was a tax, where you had to give up one month by year to the king and to the clergy, and so one month of your, that would be your taxes. That seems more likely. There is some mention of it in inscriptions, I believe, because the inscriptions on the temples are always talking about people's contributions to the temple. So there needs to be more work done by the extremely brilliant epigraphists and people who can read ancient, which is not me. But there is a lot of interesting stuff on the inscriptions, including talk about the restoration of the temple. because the queen of a king who returned in the 16th century

actually mentions about her glorious son who restored the temple of Uncle Wat and brought in lots of sculptures and that she actually shaved her head and had her hair burnt and mixed with a lacquer which they put over the statues that they brought in. And when we restored one of the statues, the biggest statues in Uncle Wad,

we found this lacquer and the lacquer is over cracks that have been restored. So it had been restored and then it had been lacquered. Wow. So we know that it was restored. That's our kind of document. So we know the date of that inscription.

You know the date that the lacquer was applied. And underneath that lacquer, we know that it was glued together and pinned by restorers in the 15th century. So they were restoring things already. What restoration work were you doing when you were there? A lot of different stuff. The project I was on was linked to a German university from Cologne under Professor Leisen. And the first work we did was on all of these Absurus. It was called the German Absurah Conservation Project. Absuris are these heavenly maidens. And we photographed all of them. We documented all of them. And then we restored the ones that needed to be restored. Now, when I say restored, I mean consolidated.

We didn't make new hands, new faces, you know, everything that had gone. So when I say conservation, we conserved what we found. We made it stronger and we made it more legible and more beautiful, but we didn't put anything of ourselves into it. And this is something very important to understand about conservation. People always say, oh, you must be so artistic. Well, it's actually the opposite of being an artist. because what you're doing is you're enhancing

somebody else's art and so you're having to make an honest interpretation of that person's art not put what you've done nobody's coming to Angkor to see what some guy born in London did on the temple they're all coming to see what the church cares do and so that's what you must have in your head

and at the same time you have to be sensitive to what the local people need because it's their temple. They built it and they still use it. So when we worked on that very statue that I was telling you about, that statue has actually been appropriated by the animist community, which is older than Buddhism, and they say that it is the statue in which the king of the ancestors lives,

even though it's actually a 12th century statue. It's got this animist cult now, which is actually runs parallel to Buddhism, so it's not in conflict at all. So when we found that it was cracking and it needed to be restored, we went into,

had lots of interviews with the shamans in the villages and the priests saying, is it okay for us to touch it? Is it okay for us to restore it? Is it good or bad? What should we do, etc? And they gave us,

they said, yes, it's good, but don't drill any holes, don't cut any of it. Because all of the stone that is there, contains the spirits of the ancestors. So anything we did, and we did actually put on some new hands, because he had some very badly made concrete hands by a previous restoration, but we had to fit them over the brake.

So instead of cutting a straight line and just sticking them together, we had to sculpt the opposite of the brake and then fit the new arm onto the old stone so that it fitted exactly, which is much, much more difficult, but was much more fun as well. And that pleased the local community. We made sure the scaffolding was open so that they can continue to use it while we were working on it. And we brought back the head, which had been taken away during the conflict to the National Museum. In fact, actually, it had been taken to the royal palace, but then had been forgotten about, and we managed to find it.

And that was a huge deal for the local community, because all of the power of the king of the ancestors lies in the head. So when we put the head back, for them, that was a massive step forward and a contribution to their life. And so that's why understanding the why these places exist and who they're for is essential before you actually start to intervene. When we spoke with these shamans, they were astonished because nobody had ever come and ask them their opinion. In fact, one of them had previously been before the Khmer Rouge, so before Pol Pot had, had, been on the conservation teams under the French. He actually had been a stone conservator, stone mason. The mental excesses I do, and that I learned there, and that I then used in Ethiopia and in Zimbabwe and in other places, is would a Cambodian walk into St. Peters and say, okay, we're going

to deal with a pietta now, without even particularly consulting the church? Well, obviously not. even though. So why are we allowed to march into a Buddhist temple in the middle of Cambodia and say, okay, we're going to deal with it, chaps? You don't do that. And when you stop thinking like that and you start to listen to the communities and collaborate with them, because there's give and take, then a whole project is much more successful because you're conserving not just the stone, but you're conserving the use, the function. And it's, whole reason that, the whole reason it is actually existing. And that's what conservation is about. So it's much more than just sticking stones together at that point. And when I learned that,

that held me in very good stead in other communities, which were completely different religions in completely different situations, because that is a regulation of correct behavior. I'd absolutely love to hear it, you know, because I think that for me, one of the things that's incredibly important about conserving these spaces is not just for tourists to go and look at. I think it's important that they continue to be these centers for worship, right? Because that's what they're supposed to be. And if we go in there and we entirely disrupt that, then... Yes, they kept the return of the head secret from the community because they were worried that transporting it across Cambodia, it's too valuable because Khmera art is unbelievably valuable. I mean, statues go for

million dollars. So they didn't tell us until the night before that we were to put it back. We were ready. So we got a call at 10 in the evening saying, okay, five in the morning, come to the depot, we're going out and we're going to put the head back on the statue. So we said, fine. We got there at five in the morning and we drove out. And when we arrived at the temple, there were 200 people sitting in front of the temple with a full orchestra and monks and umbrellas and sacrificial this and that. Because word had sneaked out that night, and the all of the villages had clubbed together and gone there. And when we got there, the heritage authorities were all looking at each other, saying,

did you tell them? Who told them? Who told them? And I was the one who said, come on, this is Sima. Everybody knows everything. This is at last house. You know, it's what we call a Simriap secret. Everybody knows it.

And they said, oh, yeah, I guess you're right. And so we stopped and we put the head in front of the altar, and we let them carry out ceremonies for two hours before we put it back on the statue. So that shows also the relevance and the importance that these things have to the communities. And how it's not impossible to work in that situation. You don't have to tread on their toes. You can work side by side. Oh, that's intensely beautiful.

Getting teary. I wanted to also talk about, you've mentioned that your interest in stone masonry kind of sparked when you were spending some time. in Venice. And I think it's interesting to talk about Venice because whereas in a place like Angkor Wat, you have this real advantage of the water as a way to move stones back and forth. In Venice, you have this incredibly beautiful form of architecture, really incredible vernaculars, but it's surrounded by water and that seems to be a bit more of a problem, right, than it is in Angerwat. Well, it was a huge problem because they didn't have any stone. They had mud and they had sand.

So what they did was they built their buildings in brick and they made glass with which they made mosaics and so on. But as they consolidated their power and moved from Torchello where they first started onto the main island, which is called the Rivo Alto, which is now the Rialto, they started to build bigger and bigger houses. mostly out of brick and then gradually as they got more powerful, they extended their influence to the northern Adriatic,

to Istria, where they have a very high-quality building stone, which is called Pietradistria, which most of Venice is built out of. So they were able then to bring the stone in from Istria, from around Trieste and Slovenia. And at the same time, like the Romans, they would, as they were trading, they would bring in the more fancy, beautifully colored marbles from around the Mediterranean. And they actually had a law which meant that all of their galleons that would leave the arsenal to go and trade with the Levant, of which there were many,

they would leave with bricks as ballast and they would have to come back with stone as ballast. So that was part of the deal with the Grand Council that you do your own trade in spices and silks and whatever you wanted, but in the bottom of the boat you had to bring back stone. And if you look at the Basilica of San Marco, it is an encyclopedia of Mediterranean stone. I used to go with my students,

and we would play a sort of version of mineral twister in which was not allowed for very long. And I would say, okay, put your foot on Tunisia, put your foot on Egypt, put your foot on Turkey, because you can. And if once you know the different stones, you've got red the antico, you've got red porphyry,

you've got Jalo Antico from Tunisia, you've got a couple of stones from as far away as northern India. That's what the Venice did. And what they did that was brilliant was they learned to cut it incredibly thin. and then open it like a book. So if you look at the walls of San Marco, you'll see that this reflecting veins of marble on the walls,

and they're only about a quarter of an inch thick. So it's practically stone wallpaper because they didn't have much stone, and they used it to decorate and make their church look glorious. I think what you were also referring to was how incredibly difficult it is to build on the mud. because buildings are heavy. So they developed their own techniques,

and that involved driving in larch wood holes into the mud, and then once one was in, they would stick another one on top of it and drive it in again, so it would be two or three deep. And they would do that in a square, where it's muddy on the edges of the island, until they'd created a very solid square foundation. And then they would build on top of those wood pulse.

In the middle, not because they didn't need to. So basically they built the weight of the four square walls was pushing down on these piles. And the piles tended not to move. And they would then build up from there. So they would build a rectangular building up. They would get to the first floor. And then they would run chains and beams across.

from one wall to another. So the chains would pull and the beams would support. So you can't see the chains because they put them inside wooden boxes that look like beams. But on the outside, you can see these key, the diagonal pieces of metal, which are the end of the chain, are looped around a pin. And that would stop the walls from bent flexing outwards. But it would also mean that the floor in the middle was quite flexible. because it's bouncing on a chain.

And so they would then put a layer of special Venetian cement, which is mixed with linseed oil, which is flexible. So when inevitably something moves, the floors wouldn't really crack, because they'd be clay, linseed oil, and fragments of marble, which is called, initially was called pastelon, that's from Venetian, and eventually it's called Terazzo Venetiano. And by the 16th, 17th century, they were even putting in decorations,

mother of pearl and all sorts of things, which you'll see in Cardetsonic or some of the more fancy 16th, 17th century, museums and palaces. So they built in an inherent flexibility by building on top of mud. The church of the Salute at the end of the Grand Canal, which is the huge domed church, is in an extremely difficult position because it's right at the tip of the canal, so it's really built on mud. and is said to have 250,000 piles underneath it to support the walls and the dams. So they really mastered the technique there. And at the same time, there were fabulous carvers. So the quality of the detail and the carving on the Ducco Palace is absolutely enchanting.

And again, you can spend days just looking at those capitals and looking at the stories. I mean, the drunkenness of Noah is a lovely one where, close to all of our hearts, if you know the Venetians. That's right at the bridge of size. No, it's very, very beautiful. The carving is extremely beautiful and extremely intricate. And that was allowed by the quality of the Istrian stone about which endless books have been written by people more knowledgeable than I about geology.

But they are, no, Istrian stone was very important. It also has a very low permeability. So that means that the bottom layer of all the palaces was always built in Istrian stone and served as a damp course. So it meant that the humidity, which would have come up the poles, once it reached the Istrian stone, pretty much stopped. And then on top of the Istrian stone, they could put brick because it was above the level of where the seawater would splash.

Sadly, that's no longer the case, not only because Venice has sunk a little bit, but also because now it has big, fat, fat motor boats driving around, which create waves, and those waves splash above the level of the estuarine stone and put salt water into the masonry, which then crystallizes and cracks them and creates the damage. So actually, while everybody knows about the issues of Venice sinking, one of the big issues in Venice is actually the waves, what they call the motot and dozo, and Venetians in their houses will yell out of the window if they hear about.

going past too fast. And I know all of the swear words of the old ladies who hang out of the windows and go, me more steal a shot if you own the woman. And you'll get that if you drive too fast. Because there are, Venetians tend not to, but the people who come from the mainland don't really know the rules. And they will. As will the police, but again, we'll cast a veil over that one. I wanted to add, well, I never, I never want to end this conversation, but I wanted to end with a just a bit of a chat about one of my personal fascinations, which is Great Zimbabwe. And I think that this is one of these just really incredible palaces that is so unsung for some reason. Can you tell us a little bit about Great Zimbabwe and who built it? I can. It is the largest and most important piece of stone heritage south of Sahara, without any question. Actually, in the area of what is now Zimbabwe, there are quite a few buildings of the same type, but nothing on the scale of Great Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe means House of Stone. So it's the only country that's named after its heritage. It was previously called Rodeo.

So it was named after Cecil Rhodes, which was not such a good thing. You'd have thought, given the fact that Mugabe took over, that they would have called it Mugabe Zizier or something. But no, they called it Zimbabwe, which is House of Stone, to their credit. Now, who built it? There was, thanks to Cecil Rhodes, that water was muddied quite a lot in the 19th century. because what the settlers and the colonialists wanted was to say this couldn't possibly have been built by the local people who were way too underdeveloped to have thought of anything

or had the capacity to do anything like that. So it must have been the Phoenicians, the Arabs, Presta John, God knows who. This was all built up by wonderful stories like King Solomon's Mines, which actually refer to Great Zimbabwe. And Cecil Rhodes actually employed a sort of adventurer called J. Theodore Bent, who was a friend of Ryder Haggards who had written King Solomon's minds. And he was told to go there and basically write the narrative of how it had been built and that it was to have been foreign people or at least.

Arab, if not white people, which he did. He went and he went with his wife and they basically wrote this narrative, which was based on no fact at all, apart from some observation. Rhodes went on to lease out these sites to private companies and in those leases, he said, we suspect that the amount of gold you will be able to find in this temple is two kilos, three kilos, whatever. So they were evaluating the temples based on how much gold prospectors could find by digging them up, which is not great archaeology. Only in the 1920s did somebody say, well, wait a minute, maybe we should call some archaeologists to come in. And what they did was wonderful. They brought in this extraordinary woman called Gertrude Caten Thompson, who was

actually working, she was a posh English lady, twin set and pearls, a set jaw, look a bit like Margaret Thatcher. And she was working with Flinders Petrie in Egypt. And they said, can you come and do an excavation? And she did. And she set off by steamer from Egypt, got to Mozambique, got caught up in the typhoons and had lots of adventures before she actually got there. Basically, she went there with two other women from England, also sturdy blue-stocking Cambridge ladies, and had the first all-women archaeological expedition in 1989, which is quite an achievement. She had been at the Treaty of Versailles. She'd met Lawrence of Arabia.

She knew all these people. and she was an extraordinary figure. She went there and she carried out systematic excavation, which was the first time. And totally rewrote the story and said, no, it was clearly through the stratigraphy. We can clearly see the date and we can see it must have been the Schoena people who built it.

We can see that they were trading even with the Chinese. There were beads, there were ceramics. And she collected all this information. She published and she went to, to South Africa and presented it, pretty much the year that they set up apartheid. So it went down like a lead balloon because there was a woman standing up saying

it was the Africans. What was wonderful was that she was saying it, not because she was a political activist of any type, she was quite the opposite. She was from the poshest sort of middle class privileged, entitled school, but she was a scientist. And she went, no chaps, This is absolutely not the case, and she stood her ground.

She got screamed at, she got yelled at, she got vilified in the press, but she stuck to her guns, and she was right. That is still questioned by settlers up into the 70s, 1970s and 1980s, who said it couldn't have been the Africans. And she only died in 1985, I think. and so her story and then subsequent archaeologists who followed up confirmed it. So it was built by the Shona Kings. It's a vast complex built in dry stone, in granite, without chisels. So that was fascinating. What they did was that when you, in southern part of Africa,

you have what they call copier, which are gigantic granite outcrops. and in the hot climate, it exfoliates. And so you get layers peeling off of granite. And they would be able to put a crowbar, basically, in between the cracks and lever these slabs off the rocks, and then break them into cubes. And they use those cubes as bricks or stones to build the walls. And they since worked out how to do that by putting fire onto these copier,

and then pouring water on them so that they would shear off. So to this day, they use that technique, but there's not a chiselmark on the whole site, which is absolutely fascinating for a stonemason because we are thinking, oh yeah, everything's done by hand, everything's stonemasons. The funniest part is that it's also against the rules in that they built in a very organic way.

They follow the landscape. It's a very African way. It follows the landscape, follows the cliffs. So it sort of rolls over the landscape in a very beautiful way. And when I said, you know, we had to rebuild

terracing that would have to support Earth. And I said, oh, we should make sure that the angle's right. So why don't we use a plum line? They looked at me as if I was a complete idiot

and just got on with it because they knew the angle because they were third, fourth generation stone maces. So I was not much point there, but what I was able to do was help coordinate. So,

what I did was that I went around the whole site and assessed the damage and the risk across the site so that we were able to say, okay, to this next. And we were able to remove the invasive vegetation, which is also colonial. It's a horrible plant, which has totally invaded the whole site, which was bought in by the sort of memesibs in the 19th century to make their gardens look nice. And it's completely covered the whole site. Anyway, we've managed to get rid of most of it. can now see it because you really couldn't see it before. I've got a treat question for us to sort of end up. And I say it's a treat.

It might be actually impossible. What's your favorite building or monument that you've worked on in your career? I think I'd have to say, Uncle what? I think it's not very difficult. I mean, I go there. I've been going there since 1994, so that's 35 years-ish. every time I go in there, I see something new. It's that diverse, it's that marvelous.

It has that thing, which Venice has too, which is even the Venetian stop at sunset on the Academia Bridge and go, wow, she's looking nice despite. Ankawat has the same thing. It doesn't stop being wonderful, even to local people. Local people are there all the time, sometimes just to go and sit there and have a cold coconut and watch the sunset.

it's beautiful and it's impressive. No, I don't think there's anywhere like that. And it deserves to be visited as does Cambodia, which is a fabulous country with fabulous people. Some of the best people in the world, Cambodians. I absolutely adore them. Yeah, you will not be sorry. Simon, you have been such an incredible treat to talk to you today.

Thank you so much for your time. By the book, everyone. But, I mean, honestly, I learned so much, and I thought that it was just incredible. You know, so I cannot stress how much fun I had reading this. Yeah, I'm just saying this because I'm sure that Harper Collins would like me to point out that it was what came out in May. And it's about to come out in the States published by Norton. There you are.

And the Odyssey. Oh, that's my publisher. It was the translation of the Odyssey. It's got a lot of prestigious people, of which I'm fairly low down the list. but it's in September it's coming out there but the British version is already online with Amazon and everything else and there's an audio book in which you can hear me

because I refuse to let anybody be me apart from me so yeah it's available in the UK and very soon in the States as well right thank you so much Simon this has been such an incredible conversation thank you very much I've enjoyed it thanks so much to Simon once again for joining me

and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want to find out more about medieval buildings and stone masonry, then do go back and listen to the episode I recorded a few years ago with Andrew Ziminski, called A Stone Mason Secrets. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent documentary with Matt on the rise of Henry II and Eleanor Vaquartain, as well as ad-free podcasts. By signing up HistoryHit.com,

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