Description:
Hadži-Prodan’s cave is located in the valley of the Rašćanska river, for which reason it is also called “Rašćanska Cave”. It was formerly called Šljepaja. It is situated at about 600 m above sea level, 7 km away from the town of Ivanjica, on the road to Guča.
The cave was named after Karadjordje’s duke Hadži-Prodan, who provided a shelter for the masses of refugees escaping from the Turks.
The cave has been researched in the length of about 400 m, and it consists of two levels. At the lower level, next to the main, there are also two ancillary channels. The entrance zone of the cave is about 3 m wide and ends with a narrowing, behind which there is a spacious 50 m long and about 15 m wide hall. The right-hand side of the hall is covered with tufa conflux and a series of shallow basins. In the central part of the hall, there are thick stalactites and stalagmites, whereas on the sides, there are gorgeously amazing confluxes that look like petrified waterfalls. The hall ends with two smaller-size penetrations-gaps. The upper level starts from the hall of the main channel and abounds in ornaments of different color and various shapes.
In Hadži-Prodan’s cave, 25 species of cave animals (insects), which have not been studied sufficiently in the world, were discovered. During the archaeological excavations in the surface layer and the recent interment at the very entrance to the cave, fragments of ceramics dating back in the older Iron Age were discovered. In the geological layer 2, trimmed stone artefacts belonging to the time between the 20th and the 10th millennia B.C. (the younger horizon) were found, whereas in the geological layer 5, the findings from the middle Paleolithic (the older horizon) as well as a large amount of the bones of Pleistocene animals, older than 13-15,000 years, were discovered.
In the cave, a 12 cm long tooth was found, as well as the parts of the skull of the cave bear. Those animals were up to 3 m long and weighed about one ton. In the cave, the traces testifying to the fact that man who lived in this period also lived in this cave were also found.
All these findings are very significant because they belong to the periods which have not been sufficiently researched in our country and which are typical for the periods they belong to (the Mousterian, the Gravettian/epi-Gravettian). The findings of quartz crystals are not characteristic either for the middle or the upper Paleolithic, so Hadži-Prodan’s cave could be considered as one of the oldest sites in the world where artifacts of this material can be found.
Hadži-Prodan’s Cave penetrates into not so numerous multi-layer Paleolithic sites in the central Balkans and offers a great potential for future research studies. The arranging of the cave for visitors is in progress, as well as the renewal of the pulled down church near the entrance to the cave, so Hadži-Prodan’s cave will serve the purpose of a tourist and speleological locality and an archaeological site.