hiddenlookingglass:germany1900:Berlin 1910I sometimes get emotional thinking about how some cities w
hiddenlookingglass:germany1900:Berlin 1910I sometimes get emotional thinking about how some cities would be completely unrecognizable to visitors from even the fairly recent past, while others still contain routes that people from hundreds of years ago would know by heart - and I don’t know which one is more moving.Can you imagine the heartache a time traveller from the 1910s would feel if you told them what happened to Berlin? Or the sense of melancholy overcoming a shoemaker from the 1400s when they walk around the Old City of Jerusalem, realizing that things have remained the same, even though they’ve irrevocably changed? I sometimes get amused about the thought of telling my great grandfather that the ‘bad part’ of the city we were both born in now contains mostly luxury stores, and that the factory he started working in when he was just a child has been rebuilt to contain an art school, student housing and movie theatres. But then I wonder how a Roman citizen from the first century BCE must feel when looking at today’s Forum Romanum - would they be horrified by the decline of their city’s heart, or would they be proud to still be remembered?How would the inhabitants of rural villages feel to learn that their former homes have been absorbed by large cities in just a few decades? What does it mean to realise that an ancient holy site has been built over and forgotten completely by people who never realized its significance?Sometimes, I wonder if it’s worse to see the marks of an unknown battle on walls you’ve know all your life, or to learn that they’ve been torn down and replaced, and you’re the only one left to remember what came before. -- source link
#oh#that's beautiful