Magical Landscapes: Monuments, Memories and Memorials
All over the world, historical records and local memory keep places alive with meaning even when the physical reminders of that meaning have been obliterated. This happens with both religious and secular monuments, and even with fictional events that never took place.
Memories Personality Monuments
"Back in the 1980s, on my first visit to Stuttgart, Germany, the man I was staying with took me walking with his dog in the local park. As we entered it, he pointed out an ordinary-looking patch of grass where, I was told, a Nazi monument had once been. It no longer existed, he said, because it had been blown up in 1945 by the French army of occupation. By telling me, a visitor who had no idea that such a thing had ever existed there, he was actually maintaining the monument’s purpose in a virtual form. Shortly afterward I met a woman who had just attended a Roman Catholic pilgrimage in Ipswich. She told me that each year local Catholics march in a procession to a shoe shop, where they stand in the street praying and singing hymns. The reason for this is that the shop occupies the ground where, in Medieval days, stood a most holy shrine of Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, which had been destroyed in 1536".
Alexandria in ancient times from ‘Travelers in the Middle East Archive’ (TIMEA) Original source: "Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque." by Georg Ebers (1878) (CC BY-SA 2.5)
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