Search for Alexander the Great’s Tomb in a Bizarre Tale of Intrigue

For over 2,300 years, researchers and historians have been trying to locate Alexander the Great’s Tomb, which remains one of the world’s greatest mysteries even to this day.

A recent effort to find it has become an acclaimed documentary that was screened at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.

The Alexander Complex unravels a bizarre tale of intrigue, politics and money as an international group of “gentlemanly explorers’” all with pseudonyms to protect their identities, come together to solve the mystery of the missing tomb of Alexander the Great.

More than a decade ago, an Algerian ex-soldier, named “Baghdad Djilali Daifallah” and code-named The Inventor, who practiced amateur archaeology, claimed to have found Alexander’s tomb in Jordan and claimed that it is filled with thousands of tons of gold and precious jewels.

Daif Allah showed incredible pictures of a mountainous area in Jordan, and an entrance to a cave, leading to chambers full of gold, during a press conference in 2013.

Sitting with the find of the millennium, the man sets in motion a project that has all the elements of a movie thriller, and a desert quest.

Telling only one person – a well-connected investor – the two men bring on board a crew of academics, scientists, diplomats, and international businessmen in a hunt that involves royal families, the military, and several costly archaeological expeditions.

Location of Alexander the Great’s Tomb is still a mystery

They hire French cinematographer Neasa Ní Chianaín and crew to send them to Jordan to uncover Alexander the Great’s tomb finally.

Over the past few years, the team has made two attempts to locate the tomb to no avail.

Despite an enthusiastic start, the expedition was prohibitively expensive and had to be called off. Daifallah insisted that they should continue claiming that there is a very small entrance opening to enter the tomb and wanted persistence to find it, however, the group now felt that they were dealing with an impostor.

The investor who believed in Daif Allah, as well as director Neasa Ní Chianaín, who made the documentary were in Thessaloniki, Greece for the screening and talked to the audience.

They were asked about the photos presented by the Algerian. “They were fabricated. What led us astray were the inscriptions in Greek, which we even showed to experts in Greece to decipher them for us, but they failed,” said the investor.

The audience asked the director what she thought of the mission.

“In my crew, we were divided. Some think we’ve missed the entrance slot to the tomb. Most say that the Algerian is simply a fraud. I think he may believe his story”, Neasa Ní Chianaín said.

Related: Alexander the Great’s Tomb: One of History’s Greatest Mysteries