Saturday, 7 September 2013

Empires...

Empires come and go. They expand and contract. This is true and it is empirically provable (or disprovable, if you prefer).

Places, on the other hand, are static. They remain in one place. If one ignores the movements of the earth, then they do not move at all. A place remains the unchanged. Things located there may change. If one encountered a building once, and returned to the same place in a thousand years time (if such a thing were possible), then one would find the same building, if it were robust enough. More likely, one would find it's ruins or only traces in the ground.

If a place stands near the boundary of two empires, then over time it is likely to be part of both. Sometimes it will belong to one, and at other times it will belong to another. There will also be times when it sits in a no-man's land between the two.

Like the tide ebbing and flowing, the empires will reach out and engulf a place and then recede and abandon it. History has a rhythm, like that of the tides. Not driven by our sister the moon, but by more distant bodies; the stars themselves, moving in their paths.

Novomosty is a place which has been subject to least two empires. As political allegiances and languages have changed then so has its name. The name may have changed, but the place has remained remarkable constant over the last century. It is, to use the common vernacular "a hole". Some people would call it something worse, by adding an adjective. They would be right. There is little to recommend Novomosty, except perhaps one thing and that only matters to someone like me.

At one time Novomosty (it went by a different name then) was a bustling frontier town, made rich and unsafe by trade and its proximity to the border. But fashions and borders and the goods which people want to buy and sell changed and the merchants and their money went elsewhere. Almost everyone who could leave, left, and what they left behind was a sparsely populated place, inhabited by ghosts, some alive and some dead.

Yes, Novomosty is a hole, and I call it home.
  

No comments:

Post a Comment