Abandoned Places: 60 stories of places where time stopped

Abandoned Places: 60 stories of places where time stopped Richard Happer Ghost towns, empty streets, crumbling ruins and lost empires this book reveals these and other deserted places. Many places featured were once populated and now sit unoccupied, modern day ruins, sitting in decay.Stories, facts and photographs of 60 beautiful and eerie abandoned places from throughout the world. Time has stopped and nature is taking resident in these places mainly due to natural disasters, war or economic reasons.Places include:• Severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, Six Flags Jazzland has been abandoned since. Several of the rides still stand, a testimony to the resilience of New Orleans.• Shicheng in China has been under water for 53 years since the Xin'an River Hydro Plant flooded the area. The city was founded 1,300 years ago.• Chernobyl was totally abandoned after the nearby nuclear disaster in 1986. Due to radiation, it has been left untouched ever since the incident and will be for many thousands of years into the future. Nature now rules the city in what resembles an apocalyptic movie.• Poveglia is an island in the Venetian Lagoon which under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte became a dumping ground for plague victims and later an asylum for the mentally ill.• Plymouth was the capital of the island of Montserrat. The town was overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions starting in 1995 and was abandoned.• St Kilda a remote Scottish Island may have been permanently inhabited for at least two millennia, the population probably never exceeding 180. The entire population was evacuated in 1930. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_d79f5199-de21-5e4b-bbef-defe70d693ee) ABANDONED PLACES Published by Collins An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Westerhill Road Bishopbriggs Glasgow G64 2QT www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) FIRST EDITION 2015 © HarperCollins Publishers 2015 Text written by Richard Happer 2015 Collins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. 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Source ISBN: 9780008136598 Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780008165079 Version: 2015-08-28 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 If you would like to comment on any aspect of this book, please contact us at the above address or online: email: [email protected] facebook.com/collinsmaps @collinsmaps Cover Image: Inside Buzludzha Monument © Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images CONTENTS Places listed chronologically by the approximate date by which they became abandoned Cover (#ufce7fda4-d8b8-5c20-837e-0600f281faac) Title Page (#ubecc57bb-19d6-57e9-a5fd-4273c6784c2a) Copyright (#ulink_e60c388b-a882-58eb-8202-1687b45c5fc9) Petra (#ulink_8647bed4-afba-5061-ae78-981ef82e203f) Machu Picchu (#ulink_a71ad834-01fc-55d6-af0c-79c027d7607e) Easter Island (#ulink_3b67ce78-4901-516b-a427-a9cc1f468a5d) Ani (#ulink_8e93fb37-584d-5a85-9b67-ee1605a8a0eb) Mandu (#ulink_6683be1d-9409-5397-8a7c-d1e5da8f8905) Ross Island (#ulink_e5b79fa1-b855-5709-959d-ff28588355f6) Stelling van Amsterdam (#ulink_123234c3-42fa-5c84-a63f-6f933373231b) Kayak?y (#ulink_16adecec-3579-5cd3-aff6-e37b2df9a5ba) Sonargaon (#ulink_c7695242-399d-5ff8-a8e6-77e756902c56) St Kilda (#ulink_c1358427-dbc2-57d3-9c3b-863f188e8724) Bokor Hill Station (#ulink_861303c1-0b49-5726-a2cf-5a0054764afd) Red Sands Sea Forts (#ulink_ed2b5356-0332-523d-8339-cf789285775c) Bodie (#ulink_a0c7472c-4f38-58c3-bf02-0943488c5398) Tyneham (#litres_trial_promo) Oradour-sur-Glane (#litres_trial_promo) Giersdorf Church (#litres_trial_promo) Graun (#litres_trial_promo) Waiuta (#litres_trial_promo) Kolmanskop (#litres_trial_promo) Detroit (#litres_trial_promo) Lion City (#litres_trial_promo) Humberstone & Santa Laura (#litres_trial_promo) Chinguetti (#litres_trial_promo) North Brother Island (#litres_trial_promo) Craco (#litres_trial_promo) Chittagong (#litres_trial_promo) L’?le-aux-Marins (#litres_trial_promo) Leith Harbour & Grytviken (#litres_trial_promo) Wittenoom (#litres_trial_promo) Poveglia (#litres_trial_promo) Canfranc Station (#litres_trial_promo) Eastern State Penitentiary (#litres_trial_promo) Varosha (#litres_trial_promo) Hashima Island (#litres_trial_promo) Tatooine (#litres_trial_promo) Sanzhi UFO Houses (#litres_trial_promo) Millennium Mills (#litres_trial_promo) Buzludzha Monument (#litres_trial_promo) Epecu?n (#litres_trial_promo) Pripyat (#litres_trial_promo) Centralia (#litres_trial_promo) Young Pioneer Camp (#litres_trial_promo) Juragua (#litres_trial_promo) Rosario Island Villas (#litres_trial_promo) London Underground Stations (#litres_trial_promo) Plymouth (#litres_trial_promo) Hotel del Salto (#litres_trial_promo) Beelitz Sanatorium (#litres_trial_promo) Objekt 825 (#litres_trial_promo) Sathorn Unique (#litres_trial_promo) Macassar Beach Pavilion (#litres_trial_promo) Pyramiden (#litres_trial_promo) Larundel Asylum (#litres_trial_promo) Saddam’s Palaces (#litres_trial_promo) Mirabel Airport (#litres_trial_promo) Athens Olympic Venues (#litres_trial_promo) Six Flags Jazzland (#litres_trial_promo) Tampico (#litres_trial_promo) Nara Dreamland (#litres_trial_promo) Kangbashi New Area (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) From Antarctic bays bound by a frozen sea to the most parched deserts on earth, from monsoon-drenched estuaries to wind-whipped Atlantic islands, there are places that humans have settled, thrived in, and then abruptly departed from. These abandoned places lie deep underground, on the highest mountain tops, in the middle of our biggest cities, in our suburbs, on our doorsteps. They are all around us, but most of the time we pass them by. Yet when we take the time to look, to explore, we find new worlds that are endlessly fascinating. What brought people to this place? How did they survive? What was life here really like? Perhaps most intriguingly of all – why did they leave? That question is answered in myriad ways. War. Natural disaster. Economic pressure. Fashion. Political gamesmanship. Greener grass elsewhere. Human foolishness. Every derelict settlement is an empire in miniature that tells its own story of glorious rise and humble fall. Here we present sixty of those intriguing tales, illustrated with photographs that perfectly capture the haunting echoes of lives long forgotten. If there can be no true beauty without decay, then these abandoned places are, in their way, some of the most beautiful places on earth. PETRA (#ulink_ffc282a3-61e3-580a-a9cd-14054076e4b0) DATE ABANDONED: AD 663 TYPE OF PLACE: City LOCATION: Jordan REASON: Environmental/Economic INHABITANTS: 20,000 CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site THREE CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST’S BIRTH, A TRIBE OF NOMADS DECIDED TO CUT THEMSELVES A CITY FROM BARE ROCK. ABANDONED AND LOST FOR A MILLENNIUM, THEIR CAPITAL WAS REDISCOVERED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND IS NOW RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S OUTSTANDING CULTURAL WONDERS. The rose-red city half as old as time It is called Petra in Greek and Sela in Hebrew; both mean ‘rock’ and few places have as simple and as beautifully apt a name. For this city that once housed 20,000 prosperous souls was carved out of, and into, the red sandstone cliffs of a desert gorge over 2,000 years ago. Most abandoned places have a short life. It is the very nature of their derelict existence: they have been let go, lost, left to the entropic power of nature. Petra, however, is almost as magnificent now as it was two millennia ago. It is mentioned twice in the Bible and Arab tradition maintains that Petra is where Moses (Musa) struck his staff on a rock and water came forth. Even then it was a wonder: one of the wealthiest cities in the ancient world flourishing in one of the harshest climates on earth. Today it is a magnificently preserved picture of an ancient civilization and a thrilling reminder that not everything we abandon need be lost. The wanderers settle down The Nabataeans were originally nomadic spice traders of the south Levant and north Arabia. They controlled a loosely structured trade network with oases as hubs linked by caravan routes through the surrounding desert. Around 300 BC, they decided to develop a more state-like kingdom and swiftly constructed Petra as their capital city. The fortress-like location of towering rocks and narrow gullies certainly made for a wonderful defensive site, but there was one major problem: water. Water management It may be surrounded on all sides by dry, searing desert, but Petra owes its existence to water. Or rather, to the skill and ingenuity of the Nabataeans in gathering that most precious of commodities and bringing it to their city. When rain does fall here, it creates flash floods that rip through the landscape, carving its distinctive gullies and gorges. For most people that rain would be too rare and too destructive to be of any use. The Nabataeans thought differently, and they built an ingenious system of conduits, dams, cisterns and pipes to channel and store the rain and spring water from a wide area. This vast plumbing network turned a meagre 15 cm (6 inches) of annual precipitation into a constant water supply that could deliver an estimated 12 million gallons of fresh water a day. In effect, they had created an artificial oasis. Its water supported the people of Petra – and was vital to travellers, which helped make the city rich. The fa?ade of Al Khazneh (‘The Treasury’) is 40 m (131 ft) high. Its position deep in a gorge has helped protect it from erosion. The Urn Tomb, first of the Royal Tombs, is built high up on the mountain side. Petra was located at the junction of a trade route to Asia and another to Arabia. These were the motorways of their day, along which caravans of 2,500 camels, up to 8 km (5 miles) in length, carried spices, cloth, ivory, metals and incense such as frankincense and myrrh. Petra was an ideal rest and refreshment point for these travellers and, as with any service station, the Nabataeans ensured they profited from their visitors. By 100 BC the Nabataeans had control of the spice trade and they used their burgeoning wealth to expand their remarkable city. Petra became a metropolis of temples, monuments, altars, houses, and banquet halls carved into the sandstone cliffs. There are 3,000 carved tombs and the open-air theatre could seat 8,000 people. The rock shakes Like all empires, the Nabataean dynasty eventually had its fall. Petra was taken within the arms of the Roman Empire in AD 106 and at first flourished in the relationship; the city was at the height of its wealth and influence around AD 200. However, the city of Palmyra gradually drew Arabian trade away from Petra, which declined as a trading hub. In AD 363 there was a cataclysmic earthquake that cracked beautifully carved facades, brought rocks tumbling from walls and fractured the seats in the theatre. Although people continued to live here, the city never fully recovered from this shock. By the fifth century the Nabataeans had converted from their own faith to Christianity and Petra became a renowned religious settlement within the Byzantine realm. But by AD 663 even the pilgrims had ceased to come and the city was deserted. The city lives again The city slept in its desert canyon for nearly a millennium, forgotten by the wider world. It was rediscovered by an adventurous 27-year-old Swiss traveller, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1812. He spent years learning fluent Arabic and had disguised himself as a Bedouin to explore as far off the beaten track as possible. Tales of the lost city’s mystical beauty captured the Victorian imagination, and it was famously described as ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’ in a poem by John William Burgon. In the First World War, Petra was at the centre of an Arabian revolt against the Ottoman regime. British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, helped drum up support amongst the Bedouins living in the area to rout the Turkish forces. The Treasury by night. Behind the facade is a large square room; Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail inside. Exploring the site Few cities on earth have as spectacular an entrance as Petra. It is approached through the Siq, a sinuous gorge that snakes for 1.2 km (0.75 miles) between gloomy cliffs up to 182 m (597 ft) high. In some places the Siq (meaning ‘the Shaft’) is only 3 m (9.8 ft) wide, but this split in the mountain is the main way of accessing the city. Visitors pad through the sandy darkness to finally emerge in a blinding cathedral of light and come face to face with one of Petra’s most famous monuments: Al Khazneh (‘The Treasury’). This was not a place of business, but rather a crypt built around the time of Christ. It later got its name from a story about bandits who had hidden gold in one of the urns carved high on the facade. Today this urn is pocked with bullet holes made by Bedouins trying to shatter it and release the treasure. In fact, the urn is solid sandstone. The Treasury’s huge pillars and pediment are of Greek influence in their design, like many of the buildings in Petra. Another spectacular carved building is the monastery (actually a temple), which is cut into a hilltop an hour’s climb from the main city. The scale of the stone-carving here is truly awe-inspiring: the monastery’s huge facade is 50 m (165 ft) square and its doorway is as tall as most houses. Cut into Petra’s East Cliff are the Royal Tombs, a group of large and impressive facades. In the warm ruby light of late afternoon the whole cliff here seems to shimmer and glow. The secrets that sleep on Film lovers will be aware of Petra’s starring role in many motion pictures. These appearances, and its regular inclusion in new ‘Wonders of the World’ lists, have widened its fame and made it one of the best known abandoned places. Today, Petra is the most visited place in Jordan and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, one of the most intriguing things about Petra is how much more of it is yet to be discovered. Only 15 per cent of the city has been explored by archaeologists; the vast majority remains underground and untouched, as it has been since antiquity. MACHU PICCHU (#ulink_a2683ebc-dec5-5376-a10d-554ab47c5e32) DATE ABANDONED: Sixteenth century TYPE OF PLACE: Inca city LOCATION: Peru REASON: Disease/Invasion INHABITANTS: c. 1,000 CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site CROWNING A SHEER-SIDED PERUVIAN MOUNTAIN IS MACHU PICCHU, AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPRESSION OF ENGINEERING SKILL AND RELIGIOUS DEVOTION THAT WAS ABANDONED ONLY 100 YEARS AFTER ITS CONSTRUCTION. THE INVADING SPANISH NEVER FOUND THE CITY, BUT THE DESTRUCTION THEY BROUGHT KILLED IT NONETHELESS. The palace in the peaks It was a royal Inca estate and religious retreat that just happened to be perched on a precipitous mountain ridge at 2,430 m (7,970 ft) above sea level. Machu Picchu was completed around 1450, and flourished as a self-sustaining stronghold of 1,000 souls for 100 years. Then it was abruptly abandoned during a time of catastrophic population collapse. Today its enigmatic remains are among the most beautiful and spectacular of all lost civilizations. It’s hard to imagine a site with better natural defensive protection. The Urubamba River encircles the site on three sides, at the bottom of cliffs that drop vertically for 450 m (1,480 ft). On the fourth side is a nearly impassable mountain peak. There was a secret entrance via rope bridge, known only to the Inca army. If an offensive army were to approach they would be seen miles away. When they arrived they would have an unpleasant climb up a near-sheer, heavily vegetated cliff face. Any attempt to starve out the inhabitants would be doomed to failure – the city had enough arable land within its walls to feed its population four times over, and fresh water is not a problem in this misty, rainy area. The design of the city itself is ingenious. The high hillsides were cut into terraces, to increase the arable land available and to decrease the incidence of landslides. As well as the agricultural zone, Machu Picchu had an urban area. Here were temples, palaces, workshops, storehouses and homes made of expertly dressed stone. Blocks, some weighing up to 50 tonnes, were cut with millimetre-precision to form faultless joints without the use of any mortar. In many places a small gap has been left in the stonework to allow walls to move and flex in an earthquake, thus absorbing much of the destructive force. Mountain-worship rituals Religion was part of the everyday fabric of Inca life and Machu Picchu itself was a physical expression of their beliefs. This was a city-shrine to the gods, a clifftop cathedral that stood in symbiosis with the mountain landscape surrounding it. There are several ‘replica stones’ throughout the city; these have been sculpted to echo the shape of the mountain peaks behind them. They were likely a sign of the Incas’ devotion to the mountain god Apo. The Intiwatana stone was an astronomic clock or calendar with a protruding gnomon that cast a shadow onto a broad base; the positioning of the shadow marked the June and December solstices. The stone also functioned as an altar. The end of an ancient empire When a fleet of Spanish ships reached the Spanish colony in Panama in 1520, on board were diseases unknown in the Americas. Smallpox, measles and other contagions ripped through the native populations. The Inca Empire was then at its height under the ruler Huayna Capac. It stretched for a thousand miles from north to south (covering much of present-day Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia), and incorporated 200 different ethnic groups. The Spanish didn’t get to Peru until 1532, when Francisco Pizarro landed on the north coast with 260 fellow Spaniards. By that time, however, smallpox, measles and civil war had already killed millions of people – two-thirds of the population of this vast empire perished. The great leader Capac was one of the dead, and his passing divided the Inca Empire; a brutal civil war erupted over which of his sons would rule. The mighty Inca armies were in disarray and the carefully organized state administration was in tatters. The Spanish started looting the temples and palaces in a virtual gold rush, as well as killing the Inca leaders. No men for maintenance Travel routes in the mountainous area around Machu Picchu require constant maintenance to be kept open. The area gets more than 1.8 m (70 inches) of rain a year, which frequently washes away roads and trails. Fast-growing vegetation will block cleared trails in a season. Even the modern roads and railway are regularly breached by rockslides and water damage. With the available manpower slashed by plague and war, maintaining such an exotic settlement as Machu Picchu was simply not a priority to the fractured Inca state. There was a large rebellion against the controlling Spanish in 1536. As the Spanish fought to quell the uprising, many Inca fled into the remote Peruvian hinterlands. To discourage Spanish pursuit, many tracks and settlements were deliberately destroyed, including those at the start of the now famous Inca Trail that leads to Machu Picchu. The city itself would by now have been overgrown by vegetation and the route in to it blocked by landslides. No one told the Spanish about its location and they never found it themselves, neither then nor at any point during the colonial period. Machu Picchu would be lost to the outside world for nearly four centuries. ‘Indiana’ Bingham ‘It seemed almost incredible that this city [Machu Picchu], only five days’ journey from Cuzco, should have remained so long undescribed and comparatively unknown.’ Hiram Bingham, writing in Harper’s Monthly, 1913 The best-known narrative of the rediscovery is a tale that truly fires the imagination. Hiram Bingham III was a mountaineer, explorer and Yale University academic who led an American expedition that planned to outdo the discoveries of famous British travellers such as David Livingstone. In 1911 he led a group that set out from Cuzco in search of lost Inca cities. Bingham got lucky, receiving a tip-off from a local about some hilltop ruins deep in the jungle. On a humid July afternoon, Bingham traversed plunging rapids on a log bridge, hacked his way up a jungled slope and finally crested a rocky promontory, to suddenly clap eyes on the magnificent remains of Machu Picchu. He may not have been the first outsider to visit the lost city, but he was the first to fully explore its treasures, and it was he who made it known to the wider world. On a second visit to the site he cleared the ruins of vegetation and photographed the city. Although Bingham also promptly removed cartloads of artefacts, mummies, stone carvings and other precious Inca relics, he was at least an academic and much of the booty ended up at Yale, where it could be studied and preserved. He wrote about his finds in the National Geographic, and the world at large was entranced by this lost Inca city in the jungle. Educated, bold and handsome, it was Bingham who became the real-life model for the fictional bullwhip-cracking adventurer Indiana Jones. The story in the stones Machu Picchu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a favourite destination of travellers to South America. To most visitors it will never seem at all abandoned. Its story, however, is a sobering one of disease, dereliction and the downfall of one of the world’s greatest ever empires. EASTER ISLAND (#ulink_3e09ea5c-d757-53b1-9cde-585b6d35b2a1) DATE ABANDONED: 1550–1700 TYPE OF PLACE: Island LOCATION: Pacific Ocean REASON: Man-made ecological disaster INHABITANTS: 15,000 CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site TO THE FIRST VISITORS IT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF ABANDONMENT. A CIVILIZATION BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE SEA HAD APPARENTLY BEEN CREATED AND THEN HAD CHILLINGLY DECLINED – BUT THE TRUTH OF WHERE ITS PEOPLE WENT IS MORE FRIGHTENING THAN THE MYSTERY. Where did the sculptors go? ‘These stone figures caused us to be filled with wonder, for we could not understand how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them.’ So wrote the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday, 1722. He had just landed on a rather barren isle with no large trees and a population of around 2,000 people. They had few tools and no mechanical devices. They did not know about the wheel. Their canoes were flimsy and so poorly constructed that they had to be constantly baled out just to stay afloat. Yet Roggeveen was astonished to see that the island was dotted with hundreds of gigantic stone statues. The islanders had worshipped these moai, by lighting fires at their bases and prostrating themselves to the rising sun. There were no trees – so how could the inhabitants have made timber for scaffolding and rollers, or thick ropes for hauling the stones? How could a society that was struggling for food spare the time to make and move these gargantuan statues? They obviously couldn’t, and yet the statues were all upright, clear of vegetation and relatively unweathered. This proved that a great civilization had occupied the island in the very recent past. So where had it gone? Later explorers found a factory-quarry where the moai were cut out of tuff, a compressed volcanic ash. There were dozens of incomplete moai half cut from the rock. Stone tools littered the quarry floor. Several completed moai stood outside the quarry ready for transport to their destination. Had a creative, determined and accomplished people just upped and vanished? Easter Island is unique among deserted settlements in that it presented its abandonment as a mystery to be solved. Brave new world One of the most remarkable things about Easter Island is that it was ever inhabited in the first place. It is one of the most remote populated islands in the world: the nearest inhabited place is Pitcairn Island 2,075 km (1,289 miles) away, while the closest point on the Chilean mainland is 3,512 km (2,182 miles) away. Moai lined up on their ahu – they face inland. The only source of fresh water on the island: a volcanic crater. Humanity first arrived here by canoe from the Marquesas Islands, 3,200 km (2,000 miles) to the west, in AD 1200. At first, life was good for the Rapa Nui, as the inhabitants were known. Pollen analysis has shown that the island was once thickly wooded, and had at least three tree species that grew up to 15 m (49 ft) high. Palms could be felled for the building of large canoes, and the hauhau tree could be used to make ropes. There was an abundance of nesting seabirds and fish. Sturdy canoes enabled the fishermen to take porpoises, which became a vital part of the islanders’ diet. With ample food for survival the population surged as high as 15,000–20,000. The Rapa Nui had spare time, which they spent making moai. This process was not easy and required great organization: the best stone to carve figures from was found at one site; the preferred rock for the headpieces in a different quarry. The tools were made in yet another location. Moai abandoned before they reached their ahu (coastal platforms). Images of the dead The Rapa Nui sculpted 887 moai. The completed figures were transported over rough, hilly ground to sites all around the island’s coast. There are competing theories about how this was done. The prevailing thinking was that great numbers of trees were felled to create rollers. The moai were then placed on skids or sleds and pulled across the rollers. Other studies maintain that they were walked to their destinations using a rocking technique controlled by teams using ropes. At their destination they were placed on stone platforms and aligned to face the island’s interior. They were erected to represent the spirits of ancestors, watching over their descendants. The tallest moai that the islanders erected stood 10 m (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes; but a partially carved sculpture, found abandoned in the quarry, would have stood 21 m (69 ft) high and weighed 270 tonnes. The island’s population was organized into clans, and moai creation became an artistic battle for tribal bragging rights: the clan that erected the largest and greatest number of moai could claim the highest status. As moai production spiralled into a virtual frenzy, huge numbers of mature trees must have been brought down. Trees were also being used as fuel for fires and being felled to create fields. The consumption of natural resources began to exceed the rate at which those resources could be regrown. Around the year 1500, the shortage of trees meant many people were living in caves rather than huts. A century later the island was almost completely deforested. There will have been a point when the islanders realized they were in trouble. The island is only 20 km (12 miles) across and its central peak has a commanding view. It would have been easy to see where the remaining groves of trees were. The man who felled the last tree must have known the irreversible step he was taking. Now no more moai could be erected. No more canoes could be built, so there would be no more porpoise to eat and no exodus to a promised land. The loss of the trees also led to the depletion of nutrients in the soil, which reduced crop yield. Food became scarce. Society could no longer afford the luxury of statue-building and so it stopped. With its resources stripped, the island could not support 15,000 people. The Rapa Nui began to die. A hard lesson to learn The mysterious abandonment found by the Europeans was therefore more of a slow suicide – and a sobering example of how devastating a man-made ecological disaster can be. In just 400 years a fertile island paradise had been stripped to a husk. Unfortunately for the Rapa Nui, life was about to get even worse. Slave raids from Peru, diseases brought by visitors and maltreatment all reduced the population further. By 1877 there were only 111 people on the island. The island’s history since then has been far from straightforward, but today there are 5,800 inhabitants with descendants of the Rapa Nui accounting for around 60 per cent of the population. Modern-day visitors make the five hour plane trip out into the Pacific to find a strikingly beautiful island with dramatic cliffs, plunging headlands and rolling swards of grass. They also marvel at the abandoned moai, the physical remains of a ghost culture. The sculptors left testaments to their industry and ingenuity, but precious few explanations for their actions. For the strange irony of the Rapa Nui is that they adapted to live in relative ease so far from other cultures as to be in another world, and yet they couldn’t live with themselves. Will future civilizations wonder where we went? ANI (#ulink_81f3b35b-57ca-5c96-a8ae-eb5940488386) DATE ABANDONED: Eighteenth century TYPE OF PLACE: Medieval city LOCATION: Turkey REASON: Political INHABITANTS: c. 200,000 CURRENT STATUS: Ruined A MILLENNIUM AGO THIS WAS THE CAPITAL CITY OF AN EMPIRE THAT STRETCHED FOR HUNDREDS OF KILOMETRES ACROSS EURASIA. IT SURVIVED VIOLENT CENTURIES OF CLASHING KINGS ONLY TO BE FORGOTTEN WHEN THOSE EMPIRES THEMSELVES FADED. NOW IT LIVES ON IN RUINS, FAR FROM THE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS OF TURKEY, A GILDED SHADOW OF ITS FORMER POWER AND GLORY. The medieval megacity There were few more magnificent cities anywhere in the world in AD 1000. Perhaps Baghdad could boast the same architectural majesty, and maybe Constantinople had a similar wealth of international trade. But Rome was in ruins, London was a mere Saxon market town and New York was a wooded island. This is Ani: the key military stronghold, the capital city and the cultural heart of a mighty Armenian empire. Ani lies deep in eastern Turkey, over 1,450 km (900 miles) from Istanbul. Even the nearest town, Kars, is 48 km (30 miles) away. There is precious little in the hinterland but sheep and goats. The plains here roll on and on in every direction, only ended at last by a horizon of slumbering mountains. This feels a long way from civilization; yet a millennium ago it was the centre of one. The city of 1001 churches Just before the Norman kings expanded their rule into England, the Bagratuni royal dynasty was crushing local tribal leaders in the area between the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and eastern Mediterranean to create an empire of their own. From AD 961 to AD 1045, Ani was the undisputed capital city of a kingdom that stretched for over 800 km (500 miles) from west to east and 600 km (373 miles) from north to south – a territory that would now include Armenia, eastern Turkey and parts of Azerbaijan, Georgia and northern Iran. The city was blessed with a superb defensive situation: a steep-sided triangular plateau rising from the ravine of the Akhurian River and the Bostanlar Valley. It also happened to lie at a nexus of trade routes that connected Syria and Byzantium with Persia and Central Asia. The canny Bagratuni capitalized on this location to transform the city into a trade hub close to the Silk Road. When the seat of Armenian Catholicism relocated to Ani in 992, the city also became the centre of a religious golden age. Churches popped up like desert flowers after a flood, and there were no fewer than twelve bishops within the city leading the faithful in prayer. Ani was famous throughout the region as the ‘City of 1001 Churches’ and the ‘City of Forty Gates’. It was also the sacred resting place of the Bagratuni kings, with an extensive royal mausoleum. The city’s population grew from around 50,000 in the tenth century to well over 100,000 a hundred years later. It probably topped 200,000 at its peak. Earthquakes have shattered the abandoned churches, mosques and walls of Ani. Trophy of the empire builders The city’s strategic location made it a pawn in a vast Eurasian game of chess. It was fought over, sacrificed, taken, even promoted to the status of a queen. The names of the nations fighting changed over the centuries, but Ani saw them all come and go. From 1044 it came under a wave of Byzantine attacks. In 1064 the town was captured and the inhabitants put to the sword by Seljuk Turks. Over the next 200 years it was owned by Muslim Kurds, Georgians and then Mongols. In the fourteenth century Ani was ruled by another Turkish dynasty, and then the Persians took over, before it became part of the mighty Ottoman Empire in 1579. By now the city’s day in the sun was dimming into its twilight. The earth’s great empires now lay elsewhere. By the time the site was completely abandoned in 1750, there was only the equivalent of a small town left within the walls. Lost and found Ani slumbered in its little nook for a century or so. It was then rediscovered by delighted archaeologists and excavated in 1893. Several thousand of its most important treasures were uncovered and removed before the site could be looted, as happened in the First World War. At the end of that conflict the city was briefly back in Armenian hands before finally being incorporated into Turkey in 1921. Today the best-preserved monument in the city is the church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents, completed in 1215. On its outer walls, elaborate animal carvings frame panels filled with ancient text. Inside, its frescos still shine with azure, gold and crimson hues as daylight floods the chamber through windows high in the central tower. Several other churches stand in various states of preservation. A couple look ready to welcome worshippers; some are cloaked in grasses and lichens. The Church of the Redeemer stands like one half of a huge nutshell, its inside exposed to the elements; the church was cleaved in two by a lightning bolt in the 1950s. The rubble from the fallen half has been heaped forlornly in a poor attempt at protecting the half that remains standing. The Cathedral of Ani has fared better. This architecturally stunning building was completed in AD 1001 and is famed for its pointed arches and clustered piers. These long predate the gothic style of architecture, which would eventually make such features commonplace. Just down the street from the cathedral is the mosque of Minuchir, the first mosque to be built on the Anatolian plateau. Its 1,000-year-old minaret survives intact along with much of its prayer hall. Ani was once encircled by powerful defensive walls, and many of these battlements and towers still stand. The walls were doubled in thickness at the northern side where the city was not protected by a river or ravine. Today these sections remain . . . ready to face an enemy that will never come. There are also the remains of a convent, bathhouses, palaces, streets with shops and ordinary homes, and the abutments of a single-arched bridge over the Arpa River. A few minutes’ walk away in the gorge is an early solution to urban overcrowding – a satellite town of caves cut into the cliffs. The same high architectural standards are evident here: there is even a cave church with frescoes on its walls and ceiling. The city’s future survival Earthquakes in 1319, 1832, and 1988, as well as blasting in a nearby quarry and even target practice by the army have all damaged the city’s ancient architecture. Some ham-fisted repair work has done more harm than good. Currently, the city is on the ‘at risk’ register of the World Monuments Fund. Ani’s sovereignty, meanwhile, remains contested. Today the ruins sit just inside Turkey; Armenia lies a piece of rubble’s throw away across a disputed frontier. Although open to visitors, it remains fenced off in a Turkish military enclave. History would suggest that this may not always remain the case. Ani may have been forgotten by the world at large for several centuries, but the Armenians have always remembered. One day they may yet reclaim their ancient city. The church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents looks out over the river gorge and the empty plain beyond. MANDU (#ulink_1294f3dd-f8e8-59f1-85ae-dde50d956814) DATE ABANDONED: Eighteenth century TYPE OF PLACE: City/Fortress LOCATION: India REASON: Political INHABITANTS: 300,000 CURRENT STATUS: Abandoned THIS HUGE FORTRESS TOWN WAS ONCE THE CAPITAL OF A MIGHTY MUSLIM KINGDOM. NOW, NEARLY FOUR CENTURIES AFTER IT CEASED TO BE THE PLEASURE GROUND OF EMPERORS, IT STILL POSSESSES EXQUISITE AND EXOTIC BEAUTY. The Rupmati Pavilion commands princely views over the Narmada Valley. Capital of kings India has an abundance of romantic ruins, lost towns and derelict forts, but perhaps none of them are as magical as Mandu. It lies at the end of a dusty bus ride 100 km (62 miles) southwest of the city of Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh. An eyrie-like plateau 300 m (990 ft) above the fertile plains of the Narmada River offers a fine defensive position and a glorious vista. A Sanskrit inscription from AD 555 records that Mandu had already been a fortress for a thousand years. It was expanded in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but its true golden age began in the fifteenth century with the crowning of Hoshang Shah, the first Muslim king of the surrounding Malwa region. He made Mandu his capital city and a truly formidable fortress. The ridge-top plateau, which measures 10 km (6 miles) from north to south and 15 km (9 miles) from east to west, was completely ringed with a defensive wall, presenting 37 km (23 miles) of battlements to would-be conquerors. Twelve heavily built gates controlled humanity’s ebb and flow. Inside the battlements, gorgeous buildings sprouted like flowers in a walled garden: mosques, palaces, Jain temples, mausoleums, and courtyards. Hoshang Shah died in 1435 and was interred in a white marble mausoleum. His ancestors were from Afghanistan, and Hoshang’s tomb is a beautiful example of their style of architecture. It is India’s oldest marble building, with a shapely dome, marble latticework, handsome towers and courts with shady porticos. It’s easy to see why the designers of the Taj Mahal came here to draw inspiration. The Jahaz Mahal Ghiyas-ud-din-Khilji ruled as sultan here from 1469 to 1500, and much of that time he devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and the arts. He built the Jahaz Mahal to house his harem, which was reputed to have numbered thousands of women. Sited between two artificial lakes, it is also known as the Ship Palace for the way it appears to float above the water in the mellow light of dawn and dusk. Its arches, galleries and domes appear as if in a dream from the Arabian Nights. Keeping cool Mandu’s elevated position meant that getting water could be tricky; but the Mughal engineers were more than up to the task. They constructed a series of wells, reservoirs and conduits to bring water to where it was needed. There are several baolis, or step wells, where elaborate staircases descend into cool subterranean chambers, and pools of water offer sweet refreshment from the summer heat and dust. The Jahaz Mahal, or Ship Palace, sits between two artificial lakes. Rupmati’s Pavilion is a large sandstone structure that was originally a military observation post. Clinging to the clifftop over a 305 m (1,000 ft) precipice, it was ingeniously supplied with water by a reservoir situated below its elevated position. Mandu even had its own hammam, or Turkish bath house, where the sultans could steam away their stately cares. Abandonment The city was the king in a continent-sized game of chess played by opposing Islamic and Hindu dynasties. It frequently changed owners over the centuries until it was taken for the last time by the Hindu Marathas dynasty in 1732. However, they soon moved out, choosing the city of Dhar as their capital, and life began to drift away from Mandu. Today a modern village, also called Mandu, lies just to the south of the ruined citadel. Its ancient heart is the huge Jama Masjid, or Friday Mosque. This is notable for its serene central courtyard and the neat ranks of red sandstone arches around the mihrab. Old Mandu may be gone, but already its seeds have grown new life. ROSS ISLAND (#ulink_98a68a8c-1ad2-582c-94cb-8222d1aafa83) DATE ABANDONED: 1913 TYPE OF PLACE: Explorers’ base camp LOCATION: Antarctica REASON: Death INHABITANTS: 25 CURRENT STATUS: Preserved THIS WAS A STOREROOM, SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY, A STABLE AND A HOME FOR TWENTY-FIVE MEN. THE HUT FROM WHICH CAPTAIN SCOTT SET OUT ON HIS FATAL JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH POLE STANDS LITERALLY FROZEN IN TIME, PRESERVED BY THE SAME SUB-ZERO CLIMATE THAT KILLED HIM. Abandoned crates outside Scott’s Terra Nova Hut, Cape Evans. Antarctic basecamp, 1911 Tinned ham and whisky are stacked on the shelves beside jars of olives and anchovy paste, awaiting the return of the man who put them there. However, he never would step back into this cosy living space and enjoy the food he had left behind. His name was Robert Falcon Scott – and when he walked out of here it was to go to his doom in an Antarctic blizzard. Scott’s sensational journey When Scott left Britain on his attempt to be first to reach the South Pole, he was already a national hero. He had commanded the National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–1904, which included another great explorer, Ernest Shackleton. Scott and Shackleton had walked further south than anyone else in history: they got to within 850 km (530 miles) of the pole. When he announced another Antarctic expedition, hopes were high that a Briton would be the first to stand on the bottom of the world. Scott’s expedition sailed from Cardiff in June 1910 on the former whaling ship, Terra Nova. It travelled via New Zealand and arrived at Ross Island, Antarctica in January 1911. Ross Island is a fearsome place. Although little bigger than Anglesey, it has four huge volcanoes, two of which are over 3,048 m (10,000 ft) tall. This gives it the highest average elevation of any island in the world. The only inhabitants are half a million Ad?lie penguins. It is almost permanently ice-bound, shackled to the Antarctic continent by the frozen sea. However, in summer, it is reachable by boat – the most southerly such island in the world, making it an ideal base for Antarctic explorers. As soon as they arrived, they set about erecting the prefabricated hut that would be home to twenty-five men throughout the Antarctic winter of 1911. It took a week to build the 15 m (50 ft) long and 7.6 m (25 ft) wide structure. The hut was insulated with seaweed quilt sandwiched between inner and outer double-plank walls, a design so successful that the men found it uncomfortably warm inside. The interior of Shackleton’s Nimrod Hut has been literally frozen in time: the bedding, tinned food and even the men’s socks still await them. The push for the pole With the base established, the next task was to lay caches of supplies on the route to the pole. The Antarctic summer presented a window of relatively better weather and constant light, but it only lasted from November to March. The expedition team needed as many supplies laid down in advance as possible if they were to complete the 1,450 km (900 mile) trek to the pole – and return – in that time. However, bad weather and weak ponies meant that the main supply point, One Ton Depot, was laid 56 km (35 miles) north of its planned location. This would cost the returning party dearly. The expedition finally departed on 1 November 1911, in a caravan of motor sledges, ponies, dogs and men. Like booster rockets on the space shuttle, one by one the support teams turned back. It was five men on foot – Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans – who scaled the 200 km (125 mile) long Beardmore Glacier and set out across the lifeless Antarctic plateau towards the South Pole. ‘The worst has happened’ Scott and his party reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912. There they discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to their great prize by five weeks. In a flag-topped tent, Amundsen had left a note to the King of Norway and a request that Scott deliver it. ‘All the day dreams must go,’ wrote the anguished Scott in his diary. ‘Great God! This is an awful place.’ There was nothing for the distraught men to do but start the 1,300 km (800 mile) return journey. This was a savage undertaking, and the exhausted explorers were pained with frostbite and snowblindness. Edgar Evans died on 17 February after collapsing at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. The remaining four trekked on, but Lawrence Oates’ toes had become severely frostbitten and he knew that he was holding back his colleagues. On 16 March, Scott wrote in his diary that Oates stood up, said ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’, then walked out of the tent and was never seen again. On 19 March the three surviving men camped for the last time. A ferocious blizzard kept them in their tent in temperatures of -44°C, and sealed their fate. They died of starvation and exposure ten days later. They were just 18 km (11 miles) short of One Ton Depot. Scott was the last to die. A search party found the tent eight months later. Inside were the frozen corpses along with Scott’s diary. The explorers’ bodies were buried under the tent and a cairn erected on top in their memory. After a century of snowstorms, the cairn and tent now lie under 23 m (75 ft) of ice. They have become part of the ice shelf, and have already moved 48 km (30 miles) from where they died. In 300 years or so the explorers will once again reach the ocean when they will drift away inside an iceberg. Frozen in time Scott’s hut was reused by Ernest Shackleton’s team in 1915–1917, but was thereafter completely abandoned until 1956, when it was dug out of the snow and ice by an American team. They found that the sub-zero weather conditions had preserved its contents almost perfectly. It’s still there today, and it offers a fascinating insight into a place that is strangely familiar and yet situated in an utterly alien world. The familiar brands show that even the boldest of Edwardian explorers loved his home comforts as much as we do: Heinz tomato ketchup (stoppered with a cork), tins of Lyle’s golden syrup, Fry’s cocoa and Colman’s mustard. Stoves, lights, fur-lined boots and clothes, bedding and dog harnesses all lie where the explorers left them. A corridor is still piled with cuts of seal blubber, which would have been used for cooking, heating and in lanterns. Dishes stand neatly stacked on shelves, cups hang from a row of hooks. Scott’s worktable has an open book, a copy of the London Illustrated News and a stuffed Emperor penguin on it. Scientific equipment fills a workbench, and the darkroom of the expedition photographer still has its chemicals and plates. There is even the rusting frame of a bicycle and some hockey sticks – after all, these men needed some way of passing their time. The hut must then have been a crowded, noisy and smelly place with two dozen men clustered round the table, trying to keep their bodies strong and their spirits up. It is bereft of living beings now, but there is life here all the same. One only has to look at the clothes, the maps, the lamps and the tins of sweet fruit stacked in hope for a return that never came, to feel the power of the human spirit. Robert Falcon Scott in the Cape Evans Hut, October 1911. Shackleton’s hut Scott’s is not the only preserved hut in the Antarctic. Ernest Shackleton’s 1907–1909 Nimrod expedition fell short in its attempt on the pole, but made a successful first ascent of Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s second highest volcano. Their hut on Cape Royds, 12 km (7.5 miles) from Scott’s on Cape Evans, stands in a similar state of preservation. Portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra still hang on the walls inside, and the shelves are stacked with 5,000 personal items belonging to the nine men who wintered here in 1908. Some of the 450 tins of baked beans and 540 lb of golden syrup that they brought as supplies are still stacked on the shelves. These Antarctic huts continue to offer up surprises. In 2010, a team found two crates of brandy and three crates of whisky buried under the Nimrod hut floor. Shackleton had originally taken 300 bottles of Mackinlay’s finest malt whisky – although a teetotaller himself, he thought his men might appreciate a warming dram in the endless Antarctic night. The legends live on The science started by Scott’s expedition is continuing even today. The readings logged by the early 20th century instruments are now being compared to current values, to help us understand the effects of climate change on Antarctica. The buildings were given a little loving renovation in 2010. Despite the brutal environment in which they stand, they will live on a little longer as shrines to the men of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration and their incredible achievements. STELLING VAN AMSTERDAM (#ulink_bba373a6-fb01-51f6-be1a-59f0e47b5b37) DATE ABANDONED: 1914–1963 TYPE OF PLACE: Defensive cordon LOCATION: Netherlands REASON: Technological redundancy INHABITANTS: Several thousand soldiers CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site DOZENS OF FORTS AND KILOMETRES OF MOATS CREATED AN IMPREGNABLE BARRIER OF WATER AND CONCRETE AROUND AMSTERDAM. IT WOULD BE UNDONE AND ITS WALLS DESERTED NOT BY THE POUNDING OF HEAVY ARTILLERY, BUT BY THE INVENTION OF FLIGHT. State of the military art The Stelling van Amsterdam was the most advanced military structure of its type in the world – 135 km (84 miles) of forts, batteries and moats completely encircling the city in a defensive barrier. Nearly half a century in the making, the colossal defensive system was staffed by thousands of soldiers. Yet it would be abandoned by almost all of them, almost overnight – not because an enemy had somehow overcome its concrete walls and bristling artillery, but because inventions in a field of combat far from here made all its brilliance count for nothing. War on the doorstep In the late nineteenth century there were three constantly clashing superpowers triangulated around the Netherlands: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. This was a time of Empire when the reward for control of the sea was nothing less than world dominion. The Netherlands was an exposed place to be. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 saw the introduction of new, more powerful artillery. The Dutch Ministry of War rightly judged that their existing defences would be vulnerable against these modern weapons. In 1874 a bold new concept was approved: a defensive belt of fortifications around Amsterdam. The initial concept was to create a defensive moat 10–15 km (6–9 miles) out from the city centre, turning Amsterdam’s low-lying coastal position into a defensive boon. In the event of enemy attack, sluices would be opened to inundate wide areas of flat farmland with water. The flooding would be no more than 30 cm (12 inches) deep – too shallow for enemy boats to cross; deep enough to hinder men on foot. The obvious weak points would be the roads, railways, and dykes that ran through the inundations; raised from the land, these would still be usable even after flooding. So forts would be built where these routes crossed the waterline, to be armed with powerful artillery ready to shell the approaching foe. A circular tower fort, still surrounded by its moat, by the River Vecht. The fort island of IJmuiden on the North Sea Canal was adapted to form part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. This 2,685 km (1,670 mile) long defensive system was built by the Germans along Europe’s Atlantic coast to prevent an Allied invasion. The first setback The first design became obsolete while still on the drawing board. Another innovation in warfare – the high explosive grenade – meant that the forts would have to be built of concrete rather than masonry. The Dutch were inexperienced in using concrete and had to undertake years of research and development. Construction itself was a vast undertaking. As well as forty-six fortifications, there were numerous smaller batteries, depots and barracks, as well as a huge network of sluices, dykes, canals and artificial islands to be constructed. When flooded, the inundations were designed to be 3–5 km (1.9–3 miles) wide. The project took almost forty years to complete, from 1881 to 1920. Completion and redundancy No sooner was this mammoth construction project complete than it was rendered instantly obsolete by two military innovations – the aeroplane and the tank. Planes could simply fly over the forts to drop bombs on the city itself. Tanks could roll through the inundations and were unlikely to be deterred by the artillery in the forts. Soldiers manned the Stelling during both World Wars, but its ingenuity was never tested in combat. However, it was methodically maintained and kept in service until 1963, when it was decommissioned. Now abandoned as a military resource, its structures are an interesting insight into the Europe of 150 years ago. They also showcase the Dutch genius for hydraulic engineering. A city wall of water and guns The Stelling is a fascinating place to explore. Many of the forts are open to visitors, and some have been preserved exactly as they were when the last soldiers left. Some are now surrounded by suburbs and can be easily reached by foot or bicycle; others stand guarding the cows in low-lying farmland. There is a hiking route that runs the full 135 km (84 miles) around the original defence line, although the island forts must be reached by ferry or private vessel. The fact that the Stelling never was attacked has ensured the survival of many of its most spectacular fortifications. Pampus Fort stands on an artificial island of 45,000 cubic metres of sand supported by 3,800 deeply sunk piles. The three-floor main building is surrounded by a dry moat 8 m (26 ft) wide and has two turrets that each held twin 57 mm (2.2 inch) guns. Within are quarters for 200 soldiers, a kitchen, laundry and classrooms, two coal-fired steam engines, two dynamos, a telegraph, a first aid station and magazines. Tunnels connect the building to galleries inside the counterscarp, or outside of the moat, where defenders could fire four M90 Gardner machine guns on attackers who made it into the moat. Also within the counterscarp were a jail, a forge, and several supply rooms. A large glacis, or artificial slope, surrounds the fort on all sides. There were originally eighty-seven polders ready to be inundated by military waterworks, and today thirty-five of these sluice systems remain. The inundation station at Schagen was typical of the Dutch mastery of water. It drew water in from the North Sea and guided it southwards to the next station in the defence line at Krommeniedijk. Had there been no major advances in military technology, the Stelling van Amsterdam would have been one of the world’s most prodigious defences. There were such advances, of course, and today the system stands as a monumental military idea, abandoned when a new strategy was made necessary. KAYAK?Y (#ulink_247e0728-d589-5041-9361-71cb08d3364b) DATE ABANDONED: 1923 TYPE OF PLACE: Town LOCATION: Turkey REASON: Political INHABITANTS: 2,000 CURRENT STATUS: Preserved CAUGHT ON THE WRONG SIDE OF A SHIFTING BORDER DISPUTED BY WARRING NATIONS, THE POPULATION OF KAYAK?Y WAS EVICTED WHOLESALE AND AGAINST THEIR WISHES IN AN ACT OF ETHNIC CLEANSING. Peace among the ruins In the ninety years since these houses were abandoned their rafters and doors have been stripped by human hands and nature’s powers, leaving only walls and chimneys standing proud of the rubble. However, despite the desolation, this is a very peaceful and enchanting place. Grassy streets run between the hundreds of crumbling hovels. Simple churches offer sanctuary from the burning sun. Olive trees flourish in the echoing town square. In spring, wildflowers add a splash of sweet melancholy to the ruins. Above it all rise the sleepy green hills which seem to hold the village in an embrace. Kayak?y is a peaceful place to wander through, but this quiet serenity belies the fact that the town as it is today was born from vicious ethnic violence. Trading places Kayak?y was founded as the Greek village of Levissi in the eighteenth century. Its population surged after the nearby village of Fethiye was shattered by an earthquake in 1856. Levissi became a centre of Greek Orthodox worship with more than twenty churches and chapels built in the village and on the surrounding plain. At the end of the First World War, the victorious Allies promised Greece territory that had been held by the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, Greek forces set out to seize these lands, occupying Smyrna and several other cities in Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey). However, the Greek army was eventually defeated by Turkish forces and the disputed territory was incorporated into the Republic of Turkey. There was then a population exchange between the two countries: Greeks living in Turkish territory returned to Greece and vice versa. The numbers were huge – at least a million Greeks made the move and 500,000 Muslims were displaced from the Greek territories. The wholly Greek town of Kayak?y was left deserted when its population was forcibly sent to a motherland that the people barely knew. The spiritual atmosphere amid the stones As well as its atmospheric, tumbledown houses, Kayak?y has several interesting historic sites. A handful of buildings have been restored and one is home to a small museum that explains the history of the settlement. There is a splendid fountain in the middle of the town and two notable Greek Orthodox churches. Known as the Lower and the Upper Churches, these are small and built in a seventeenth century gothic style. Inside the Upper Church. The scattering of roofless houses seen from above. The Lower Church was at the heart of the town. The Lower Church is the better preserved, with traces of blue and gold on its altar. Crowning the highest hill in the town is the Upper Church, the older of the two. Outside the building, the mosaic courtyard is still in remarkably good condition. Inside, the church presents a very poetic picture of decay. Scattered holes in the roof let in shafts of sunlight, illuminating the interior as if to suggest that somebody up there still cares about this place. SONARGAON (#ulink_748d758d-d782-5490-8098-6bedd3ac91ed) DATE ABANDONED: Twentieth century TYPE OF PLACE: City LOCATION: Bangladesh REASON: Economic/Religious INHABITANTS: Thousands at its peak CURRENT STATUS: Gradual decay A RICH TRADING CENTRE PRIZED BY HINDU, ISLAMIC, MUGHAL, AND BRITISH EMPIRES IS NOW SLOWLY BEING WASHED AWAY BY AN INDIFFERENT CLIMATE. SOME OF THE OLDEST BUILDINGS IN BANGLADESH ARE ALL BUT LOST AMID THE RAINS AND THE FLOURISHING JUNGLE. The town of many empires It is only 24 km (15 miles) from the hive-like hubbub of Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka, but Sonargaon feels like it exists on a different planet. It was a Hindu trading outpost by the thirteenth century and it later became an Islamic spiritual retreat. As seagoing international trade increased from the fourteenth century onwards, Sonargaon steadily grew in size and influence. It boomed again under British colonial rule, with the establishment of the textile-producing neighbourhood of Panam City. Street after street of elegant Indo-European townhouses were built in the late 1800s to house a prosperous new population of upper-middle class Bengali businessmen. Left behind in a new age British rule officially ended in 1947, and the former empire was divided along religious lines: India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim). As Sonargaon became part of East Pakistan, many of its Hindu residents fled across the border to India. Bangladesh was established as an independent country in 1971 at the end of a fierce civil war. By that time this once affluent town had been abandoned, with most of its remaining inhabitants having moved to the growing city of Dhaka. Today the old town is recognized as being at risk and is officially protected. However, the damp climate, lack of maintenance and infestation with woodworm and other pests are all causing visible damage to the buildings. Spacious rooms ringed with elegant arches, where the floors were once covered in bolts of golden cloth, are now home only to puddles and damp stone. Carved stone balustrades writhe with vines and the once airy balconies are choked with young forest. Where roofs have tumbled in, the walls are often slick with running rainwater, which washes away a little more plaster here, a little more there. Perhaps a new influx of tourists will bring in the money the town needs to preserve its architectural treasures, but it’s hard to imagine this happening. This is a land where mere survival can be difficult enough: 80 per cent of Bangladesh is flood plain and the country is prone to flooding from the annual monsoons and frequent cyclones. Change here is rapid and ruthless, and it may have irreversibly made its home in the streets of Sonargaon. The only resident in a street that once housed hundreds. ST KILDA (#ulink_cee65d48-eacf-586f-ae44-5d40a15438cc) DATE ABANDONED: 29 August 1930 TYPE OF PLACE: Island community LOCATION: Hebrides, Scotland REASON: Hardship INHABITANTS: 36 CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site/Military base FOR 2,000 YEARS, A SMALL COMMUNITY LIVED ON AN ISLAND THAT WAS PART OF BRITAIN YET UTTERLY ALIEN TO IT. AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CAME KNOCKING, THEIR ANCIENT, MONEYLESS WAY OF LIFE SIMPLY BECAME TOO DIFFICULT COMPARED WITH WHAT WAS AVAILABLE ELSEWHERE. The steep cliffs of St Kilda are home to the largest colony of gannets in Europe. There are more than 60,000 nests. The island on the edge of the world ‘And I am come down to deliver them . . . and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey . . .’ The Book of Exodus The minister finished his reading and left the Bible open on its simple wooden lectern. The people briefly returned to their houses to place small piles of oats in their hearths as tokens of faith, or gratitude. Then they gathered up the last of their belongings and let the minister lead them down to the jetty. There they boarded the ship that would take them away from the only home that they had ever known, and bring two millennia of human habitation on St Kilda to an end. The westernmost isle The archipelago of St Kilda is not just wild, it is beyond the horizon. Although part of the United Kingdom, it never appears in any road atlas. Firstly, that’s because it has no roads; but it also lies 64 km (40 miles) out into the Atlantic Ocean off the westernmost point of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. It is by far the most remote part of the British Isles ever to be anyone’s home. The largest island of the group, and the only one ever to be inhabited, is Hirta, which also has some of the highest sea cliffs in the United Kingdom. There are three other islands: Dun, Soay and Boreray, and several spiky sea stacks rising like giant canines from the heaving swell. A communal way of life The islands were first inhabited during the Bronze Age and supported a population of up to 180 for much of that time. The St Kildans originally spoke Gaelic, not English, and were clothed in a similar style to people in the Outer Hebrides. The islanders lived in various types of dwelling over the years, some of which remain. The crescent of cottages that we see today was built in the 1830s. Originally they were Hebridean black houses with a single room in which the cattle also slept in winter. Each house had its own strip of land for growing crops. New houses, which boasted a second room, were built in the 1860s. There is only a little arable land, but there is an almost limitless supply of seabirds. The men would meet in a daily parliament to decide which tasks needed to be done and who would do them. Usually, this meant most of the men scaling the dizzy cliffs and collecting the birds by snare, fowling rod or by hand. Puffins, fulmars and gannets were the most commonly eaten birds, and their feathers and oil were also put to good use. Other jobs included mending fishing nets or collecting sheep from the outlying islands in a small boat. Life was simple. It has been estimated that each person on St Kilda ate 115 fulmars every year. Puffins were a favourite snack. Food was unvarying, but it was nutritious and plentiful; the islanders did not starve. Every haul of eggs, fish and seabirds was divided out equally amongst the villagers. There was no need for money. For centuries the only contact with the outside world were the occasional visits of whaling and fishing boats, and the annual visit of the rent collector. The islanders rented St Kilda from the Macleods of Dunvegan in Skye – a far-off landlord. As the islanders had no money, the Macleods’ rent collector accepted payment in oats, barley, fish, cattle and sheep products, and seabirds. He would also trade in goods that the islanders couldn’t make, such as tools and homewares. The rent collector was accompanied by a minister who performed any baptisms and weddings that had become necessary in the previous year. As more frequent communication became established, the church on the mainland began to send ministers out more often. A church and manse were built in the early nineteenth century and a minister moved in full time. A school was added in 1884. Oppressed by religion A visitor in 1697, Martin Martin, noted that the people loved to play games and make music. However, the Victorian tourists often commented on how sad the people seemed. As if life here wasn’t tough enough, the minister who came in 1865 seems to have been a ‘fire-and-brimstone’ merchant of the first order, who ruled the people with a cross of iron. He made attendance compulsory at three Sunday services, each two or three hours long. When a boat bringing vital food to relieve a near-famine arrived one Saturday, the minister told the skipper he must not unload the supplies until Monday: the islanders had to prepare for the Sabbath. The island’s children were banned from playing games, and had to carry a bible with them at all times. So much time was spent in observation of religious matters that practical matters became neglected. ‘The Sabbath was a day of intolerable gloom. At the clink of the bell the whole flock hurry to Church with sorrowful looks and eyes bent upon the ground. It is considered sinful to look to the right or to the left.’ A visitor in 1875 First contact with the wider world The steam yacht Vulcan visited St Kilda in 1838. This was one of the first meetings between ordinary British people from the mainland and the islanders, but such interactions would soon become common. Victorians were fascinated by what they regarded as a primitive people living at the very edge of Britain, the most civilized nation on earth. This was a defining time in their history: before then, the outside world must have seemed alien and unattractive to the St Kildans, if not downright terrifying. Now they had a greater understanding of what it could offer; particularly how much more comfort it was possible for people to enjoy. Some inhabitants decided to make a complete break. In 1852, thirty-six – more than one third of the island’s population at the time – sailed for Australia. The ones who survived the arduous journey settled in Melbourne, where they named the suburb of St Kilda after their home island. In 1877 regular summer cruises took curious tourists out to see the St Kildans. By 1889 the islanders were spending much of their time making things that they could sell to the visitors: tweeds, gloves, stockings, scarves and sheepskins. They also sold many of the birds’ eggs that they collected. This brought them new clothes, equipment and food, but it also destroyed their self-sufficiency. They came to depend on imported fuel, provisions and building materials. It wasn’t just skills they lost, but also the will to continue making the huge effort necessary to live on St Kilda; their morale was waning. The lack of regular communication with the rest of Scotland led to some trying times. A food shortage in 1876 got so bad that the islanders had to call for help. The only method open to them was sending out a message in bottle: a letter begging for food was sealed in a small wooden casket and a sheep’s bladder attached to act as a float. This was then launched into the waves in the hope that it would wash up on the mainland, and be found, before the situation got too much worse. There was another famine in 1912 and the following year influenza savaged the islanders. The First World War might have seemed remote, but it affected even this lonely island. The islands were in a strategically useful position, and a naval detachment came to the island to run a signal station. Their presence meant frequent landings of mail and food. Unlike nearly everyone else in Europe, for the St Kildans the war was a time of certainty, security and relative plenty. At the conflict’s end the regular deliveries dried up. It must have laid a heavy sense of isolation on the islanders, because most of the able-bodied young islanders emigrated. There were 73 islanders in 1920; by 1928 there were only 37. The years of regular communication with the mainland had shown them that there was an alternative, easier, life to be had there. The island’s once smoothly functioning society was irreparably broken; its days were numbered. Influenza returned in 1926, killing four men, and there were frequent famines from crop failures throughout the 1920s. When a pregnant woman died from appendicitis in January 1930, after being unable to be evacuated due to bad weather, the islanders had had enough. The thirty-six remaining islanders unanimously decided to leave and asked the British Government for homes on the mainland. On 29 August 1930, two millennia of human habitation on St Kilda came to an end. Most of the refugees who left here in 1930 settled in Argyll. The younger men were given forestry jobs, which was a strange choice, as most of them had never seen a tree. Exploring today The entire archipelago is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. It is a World Heritage Site and one of the few places to be so honoured both for its natural and its cultural qualities. There has also been a missile tracking station here since 1955, which brought with it a few permanent military residents. Several conservation workers and scientists come to stay every summer. There are no ferries to St Kilda, so visiting is a matter of hiring a vessel and a skipper. The journey over in a little boat can be ‘lumpy’ (as one captain memorably described some enormous waves) but it makes the arrival all the more impressive. As the islands get close it becomes clear how enormous the cliffs are. The huge sea stacks erupt sheer out of the waves and tower endlessly above you. It’s as if the great crags of Ben Nevis had been scooped up and dropped into the ocean. The cliff face of Conachair rises 427 m (1,401 ft) straight up out of the waves. All the time the puffins and gulls wheel and swarm above the boat in a kaleidoscope of coloured feathers. The noise of their thousands is multiplied into a cacophony by the rock walls. The village itself is modest, lying in an arc of flat land between two curving rock headlands, as if being embraced by the island itself. It has just one street, with a dozen or so single-storey stone cottages facing the endless sea. A cluster of stone sheep-folds and the tiny jetty are just about the only other structures here. One thing the island does have in abundance is peace. Standing here past the far west of our everyday world as the sun sets further west still, it is plain to see how hard it was to live here; but also, how hard it must have been to leave. Sixteen new two-room cottages were built in 1860; they are now mostly roofless shells. BOKOR HILL STATION (#ulink_b5dd8dd5-2aca-5852-95f3-7c26765791be) DATE ABANDONED: 1940s TYPE OF PLACE: Colonial resort LOCATION: Cambodia REASON: Political INHABITANTS: Seasonal guests and staff CURRENT STATUS: Abandoned LOST IN THE MOUNTAIN MISTS IS A HILLTOP REFUGE OF INDOCHINA’S COLONIAL OVERLORDS. ITS RUINED CASINO, BALLROOM AND APARTMENTS OFFER A GLIMPSE BACK IN TIME TO A VERY DIFFERENT ERA OF SOUTHEAST ASIA’S HISTORY. Ghosts on the mountaintop When the mists shroud Bokor Hill Station, which they frequently do, the decaying buildings take on an almost supernatural aura. The balconies built for views of the plains far below now look out into a spectral grey emptiness and the silence in the long-empty rooms becomes almost palpable. It’s easy then to imagine the elegant, dinner-jacketed ghosts of the colonists who built this little outpost of French civilization in the forested wilds of Cambodia. The cool retreat in the hills Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1867, and then part of French Indochina, a federation of colonies that included territory in Vietnam and Laos. Phnom Penh may have been known as the ‘Pearl of Asia’ for its beauty, but it was also hot, humid and full of the noise and dirt of a capital city. For half the year it was deluged by torrential rain. The colonial French settlers wanted a bolthole in the hills where they could enjoy a more temperate climate, much as the British had at Darjeeling in India. Bokor Hill was built as just such a resort in 1921. Perched on a mountain-edge at a lofty 1,048 m (3,438 ft), the site offered spellbinding views to the Gulf of Thailand. The resort’s largest and most magnificent building was the grand Bokor Palace Hotel and Casino. There were also shops, a post office, a Catholic church and the grandly named Royal Apartments. However, the mountain is remote and the surrounding landscape is unforgiving: 900 workers died during construction of the resort. The empire crumbles Colonial rule in Cambodia was interrupted during the Second World War; France itself was invaded by Germany in 1940 putting it in no position to defend its colonies. Despite General Charles de Gaulle’s determination to re-establish French Indochina after the war, Cambodia moved ever closer to independence, which it finally won in 1953. The French left Bokor Hill during the war and never came back. It was then occupied by various local anti-French resistance groups before being taken over by the Khmer Rouge, the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. In 1979 the Khmer Rouge used it as a military fortification, holding out in the former casino against the invading Vietnamese forces. The brutal regime was ousted from power, but a pocket of Khmer Rouge fighters kept possession of Bokor until the early 1990s. Since then it has been completely abandoned. The site is government-owned but has been leased to a development group, which plans to repair the old hotel and casino and add new restaurants and a golf course to resurrect Bokor as a resort. However, at the current time this plan has not advanced and the buildings are still in a derelict state. RED SANDS SEA FORTS (#ulink_a106433e-d412-5158-bfe6-770fae150448) DATE ABANDONED: 1943 TYPE OF PLACE: Military fortification LOCATION: Thames Estuary, UK REASON: War INHABITANTS: Up to 265 CURRENT STATUS: Ruined WHEN HITLER’S LUFTWAFFE TARGETTED SHIPPING IN THE RIVER THAMES DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THE ADMIRALTY CREATED AN EXTRAORDINARY UNIT OF OFFSHORE ANTI-AIRCRAFT FORTS. IN THE 1960s THE DECOMMISSIONED STRUCTURES BECAME HIDEOUTS FOR PIRATE RADIO STATIONS BEFORE BEING LEFT TO THE MERCY OF THE SEA. Red Sands Sea Forts in the Thames estuary, now abandoned. The Kentish Flats windfarm is just behind on the horizon. Stalkers of the sea They look like one of H. G. Wells’ most fantastical creations come to life: four-legged, fat-bodied metal monsters striding in formation through the waves off the English coast. But these sea-bound structures are not invaders: they were actually a vital part of Britain’s coastal defences in the Second World War. They would also have been a prime contender for the title of strangest street in Britain. For here 265 men lived in seven interlinked houses, each measuring just 11 m (36 ft) square and completely surrounded by the cold, black waters of the North Sea. Innovation in offshore defence London’s docks were the busiest in the world in 1939. They were the trade hub of the British Empire and a conduit for one third of the country’s imports and exports, handling 35 million tonnes of cargo per year. More than 100,000 dockers, stevedores and sailors bustled around 1700 wharves. The outbreak of the Second World War made the docks – and the Thames shipping routes – imperative targets for German bombs. With the war under way, German aircraft laid thousands of magnetic mines in British waters. Over 100 British ships were sunk in the Thames estuary alone in the early months of the war. The Thames urgently needed anti-aircraft defences and the Admiralty asked engineer Guy Maunsell to help. He designed two types of fort, the Navy and the Army styles. An ‘Army fort’ comprised a group of seven 4-legged towers connected by tubular steel walkways. These structures were built in Gravesend, towed down-river and then carefully sunk onto the seabed between May and December 1943. There were three Army forts: Nore, Shivering Sands and this one at Red Sands. Each tower had a two-storey structure for living and working, with differing artillery or other equipment on the roof: one tower had two 40 mm Bofors medium anti-aircraft guns, four towers had 3.7-inch heavy anti-aircraft guns, one tower had a searchlight and there was also a central control tower with radar. The forts were not a popular posting among soldiers. As well as being cold, windy, damp and isolated places to live, the towers were very vulnerable to enemy attack. Being metal towers amid an open sea also made them extremely good lightning conductors. Even on non-stormy days static electricity would build up to such an extent that soldiers who touched metal door handles would be thrown across the room. Nevertheless, the Thames forts were a success. Their searchlights picked out hundreds of approaching aircraft and their guns downed twenty-two planes, over thirty flying bombs and accounted for one U-boat. They were maintained for a decade after the war ended, but in 1956 their guns were removed and they were left to the mercy of the North Sea. They would probably all have been allowed to rust into oblivion were it not for some very unlikely new tenants: rock-and-roll radio outlaws. Ruling the airwaves In 1964, a new era in broadcasting was launched from a ship moored outside UK territorial waters: Radio Caroline. This pioneering pirate radio venture inspired promoter and personality Screaming Lord Sutch to set up ‘Radio Sutch’ in one of the Shivering Sands towers a few months later. For the next few years the venture flourished, taking over the four other towers that were still connected by walkways, and becoming known as Radio City. Red Sands was also occupied by a pirate broadcaster: Radio Invicta, later named Radio 390. The Army forts were ideal for pirate radio broadcasting in their form as well as their location. A large antenna could be placed on the central tower and then guyed to the surrounding towers. They had also been designed for habitation, however rudimentary. The pirates were outlawed for good in 1967 and formally evicted; but there would be one final offshore resident. The Principality of Sealand Paddy Roy Bates was an ex-British Army major and pirate radio broadcaster. When offshore broadcasting was outlawed in 1967 he moved into Roughs Tower, a Maunsell fort of the Navy design. He then declared this to be the ‘Principality of Sealand’, the world’s smallest independent country, and himself to be its prince. ‘Prince Roy’ created a constitution, a national anthem and a flag, and he issued passports. The Royal Navy tried to close him down, but their case was thrown out in court: the judge ruled that Britain had no territorial right over Sealand. Thereafter Bates was left to pursue his eccentric vision of nationhood more or less unmolested. Red Sands today The Nore group of towers was considered a shipping hazard and was completely demolished in 1959. A ship crashed into one of the Shivering Sands towers in 1963, knocking it into the sea. That leaves Red Sands Fort as the only complete set of Maunsell Army towers still standing. The first difficulty faced by would-be visitors to Red Sands Fort is that of simply finding the place: the fort stands 10 km (6 miles) offshore from Minster on the Isle of Sheppey. That accomplished, the heaving sea makes getting a boat in close a highly risky endeavour. On approach the image of giant stalking machines is even more powerful as the towers dominate any craft. The tower ‘bodies’ are all rusted a violent red all over, with the occasional daub of white paint picking out the slogan of a long-defunct radio station. The sea-level ladders and walkways that soldiers once used to access the towers are now rusted to the point of uselessness, with the brine-rotted metal crumbling to the touch. However, a few visitors have managed to climb inside and they have reported a fascinating window into Britain’s wartime past. The cell-like iron rooms are still cluttered with rusted generators, the remains of radar equipment and steel-legged tables where enemy aircraft movements were plotted. There are bookshelves for charts and logbooks, and a cast-iron enamelled bath in which soldiers must have once sat and washed themselves while staring out of the window at the endless sea. From the roof it is easy to see how the seven towers would once have linked up so neatly, and how impressively exact their construction was in such an incredibly difficult environment. In 1944 this spot would have been the centre of a blazing cacophony of gunfire, with men yelling and machinery clanking. Now the only sound is the slap of the waves, the odd seabird and the clanging of the bell in the nearby buoy that marks the edge of the shipping channel. A few military furnishings still lie inside today. A supply boat arrives at the active forts. BODIE (#ulink_2712641b-3076-5635-ac9e-b4b898715a5c) DATE ABANDONED: 1943 TYPE OF PLACE: Gold mining town LOCATION: California REASON: Economic INHABITANTS: 8,000 CURRENT STATUS: Preserved decay GUNFIGHTERS, GOLD NUGGETS, RAILROADS, OUTLAWS, SALOONS, DANCING GIRLS – IN JUST A FEW YEARS THIS TOWN HAD EVERYTHING THAT MADE THE WEST WILD. THEN, IN THE SPACE OF ANOTHER FEW, IT LOST IT ALL. Boom and bust in the wild, wild West Willam S. Bodey came all the way from Poughkeepsie, New York to strike it rich. In 1848 he left his wife Sarah and his two children behind and took a boat around the Horn, arriving in San Francisco along with 300,000 other would-be gold miners. Unlike the majority of the ‘49ers (as the prospectors who took part in the gold rush of 1849 were known), Bodey actually did strike gold. Ten years after he landed in California he got lucky in the scrubby hills north of Mono Lake. A gold rush started following his claim and the town named after him sprang into existence. Bodey himself saw none of its wealth – he froze to death in a blizzard just months after his big discovery. After a slow start, the town of Bodie really hit pay dirt in 1876. A rich new seam of gold ore transformed Bodie from an isolated backwater camp into a virtual metropolis. California and Nevada newspapers billed the town as the next Comstock Lode – where a huge discovery of silver and gold ore had created immense fortunes. Soon there were 8,000 people living and working in 2,000 buildings. Looking east from the cemetery in the 1890s. Bodie epitomized the ‘Wild West’ town. Its mile-long main street had a Wells Fargo Bank, a jail and sixty-five saloons. Every night the miners and ore workers rushed into town to drink their pay. The air ran with the sound of gunfire as brawls spilled onto the streets and men died in shootouts at noon. Stagecoach holdups were so regular that armed guards soon accompanied the shipments of bullion from the town. Bodie had a thriving cluster of brothels, a railroad, a telegraph station, several daily newspapers and its own Chinatown complete with a Taoist temple and opium dens. The town had nine stamp mills, where ore was crushed for processing. There was a cemetery and even a separate Boot Hill – the graveyard for those who had died with their boots on, i.e. violently. Mining in Bodie reached its peak in 1881 when ore worth $3.1 million was dug out of the scrubby hills. However, within just a few years it was clear that the seams in the area were fast being worked out. New strikes in Butte, Montana, and Tombstone, Arizona, began to lure the professional miners away with the promise of new bonanzas. There were still several thousand inhabitants and several working mines at the turn of the century, but by 1910 there were only 698 people left in Bodie, most of them families who had decided to make a go of living in this remote corner. It was a brave stand, but it wasn’t to last. Only $6,821 of gold was mined in 1914. Three years later the railway was scrapped. A couple of mines limped on for a while but the last pickaxe was swung there in 1942, and the handful of remaining residents departed soon after. The stage is still set Most visitors remark how much Bodie looks like a movie set. Very few abandoned places can claim to have a whole cultural genre based around their heyday, but Bodie can. The characters, landscapes and architecture of the ‘Western’ are so familiar to most of us that one almost expects Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood to step jingling from the saloon. After a little exploration, however, it slowly dawns that, of course, movie sets look like Bodie. This is not a plywood reconstruction, but the real thing, where people lived, worked and died. The wooden buildings huddle together in the lee of the mountain. The humanity of some abandoned places can seem remote, almost abstract, but Bodie is so real in its dereliction that it almost feels like a person itself. The buildings are scattered around the landscape, many of them sulking in hollows like children denied a treat. It’s easy to imagine how each individual prospector arrived and grabbed his own little patch, then defended it dearly. It must have been hard to be a good neighbour in a town where it might be the fella next door who bags the bonanza while all you ever dig up is dirt. Today there are just over 100 buildings still standing, left as they were when the inhabitants headed to pastures new. A Methodist church was built in 1882 and still waits for the faithful today. As families followed the single men to Bodie the wildness of the town was tempered a little. A Roman Catholic church was built the same year, but that burned down in 1930. The cemetery has about eighty gravestones, and many of the inscriptions can still be easily read. A few have been worn down by the harsh Bodie winters; as those who sleep beneath the stones were worn down too. The abandoned cars lying around Bodie stem from its popularity as a ghost town – it was billed as such a century before this book was written, in 1915. As motoring increased in popularity, sightseers drove out to see this strange relic of a past that wasn’t all that distant but must certainly have seemed so when viewed from the leather seats of a Chrysler Imperial limousine. Many of these vehicles never made it home again, the rough roads, baking summer days and freezing nights taking their toll on the rudimentary automobiles. Perhaps a few even fell victim to aged gunslingers. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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