Legend · Traditional founding to 1923, and today · Mixed
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Climb 660 steps above Idanre and you reach an empty town: a palace, a court, a prison, a school. The people lived up there for centuries and came down in 1923. They left their legends behind on the rocks.
There is a story about a man from Idanre who lived in Lagos for all of his 43 years. He finally came home with his wife and children, arriving at dusk. One look at the town crouched under its hills and he was so frightened that he refused to sleep there, and went back to Akure for the night.
You can understand him once you see the place. Idanre, in Ondo State, sits at the feet of huge rock hills about 3,000 feet high. To a nervous visitor the boulders look as if they could roll down onto the houses at any moment. The town looks tiny beside them.
The people's own story of how they got there begins in Ile-Ife. A descendant of Oduduwa, the father of the Yoruba, left Ife with a band of followers. They took with them a magic crown, the Ade Omo Oduduwa, the crown of Oduduwa's son. Their kinsmen were furious and chased them deep into the forest. The group kept moving for years. Then they came upon these hills and stood there amazed. "Idanree!" they said. This is wonder. The name stuck.
And they did not settle at the bottom. They went up. According to the town's own account, the people of Idanre lived on top of the hill for more than 800 years before they moved down to the plain in 1923.
Getting up there today means climbing Ibi Akaso, the Great Steps: 660 of them, winding up the rock with five resting points along the way, each at least 100 metres apart. You need legs that won't quit and a head that doesn't mind heights. The steps are the first of the hill's "Nine Wonders", and the rest are waiting at the top.
Most of the legends on the hill are tied to one man, Agboogun, a hunter with supernatural power. He is responsible for three of the wonders by himself.
The story goes that he set out on a journey with three companions. Along the way he stopped and scratched strange marks into a hillside. Nobody has ever been able to read them, so they are called the Unreadable Signs. A little further on he cut broad criss-cross strokes into another rock face, and that became the Wonderful Mat.
At the foot of the steep Aghagha Hill, he struck the rock with his foot and left a print. It is called Ese Agboogun, Agboogun's Footprint, and it has a job. People accused of witchcraft are made to put their foot in it. The belief is that the print fits any foot at all, except the foot of someone wicked.
Agboogun also guards the crown. In the town's telling, a thief from Ife managed to steal the magic crown and ran. Agboogun went after him, struck the ground with a magic staff, and the thief froze where he stood. The hunter cut off his head and took the crown back. On the very spot where the thief's blood was spilled, the king of Idanre still wears that crown once a year.
There is a spring up there too, Omi Aopara, the Thunder Water. Warriors used to drink from it before going to war. If thunder rumbled while it was your turn to drink, you were left behind, because it meant you would die in battle. Far off, Orosun Hill sits under a haze from morning to night. Orosun, they say, was a woman warrior who protected Idanre and simply vanished at the foot of the hills, where her shrine now stands. The Arun River flows out from under that hill, and people say it heals.
What makes Idanre different from other legend sites is that the town is still up there. When the people came down, they left their buildings behind.
On the hilltop you can walk through a full set of old homes. There is the old palace, a low mud building around an inner courtyard held up by carved pillars. Inside are animal skulls from the yearly sacrifice of a cow, one for each year the current king has reigned. Nearby stands a crumbling house with a black slate sign: remove your shirt before you enter. It belonged to a chief who, people say, wore nothing except a single piece of cloth.
Behind it is a low-walled house with mesh and a roof, which served as the prison. A little way off is the court, and behind the court is the clearing where the king puts on the crown each year. There are also the remains of the Igbo Ore Primary School. Above it all a giant boulder sits on a hill over a hut, balanced so badly it looks ready to drop. The locals call it the Wonderful Rock.
Up top the air is mild and the forest is thick: obeche, afara, bamboo, banana, cashew and coconut palms, with clear pools and streams. Someone still grows cassava there. At least one elephant was killed on the hill in recent years, people told the writer.
The hill is tied to Ogun, the god of iron, who is Idanre's most honoured deity. Wole Soyinka visited in 1962 and in 1967 published a poem named after the town, casting it as Ogun's home. Ogun's festival comes every October, and the chiefs dance in procession with the king dancing last. Any chief the king catches up with on the way to the hill, the belief goes, is in for a terrible year and an early death.
In October 2007 the hill went onto UNESCO's tentative list for World Heritage. It had been famous long before that, for a town that chose to live among the rocks.
