Puneyn buildings 12: the homes on the left used to have neighbours on their right, but those neighbours, those neighbourhoods, were lost when the Turkish military destroyed them.
Monday, 18 June 2007
Puneyn buildings 12: the homes on the left used to have neighbours on their right, but those neighbours, those neighbourhoods, were lost when the Turkish military destroyed them.
The home between the ruins visible in Puneyn buildings 10 and 10b displays the wooden-framed, earth/turf roof that would have once spanned the tops of both ruins and that would have quickly transformed into grassland. It is only the stone walls that maintain the building's identity, so when they are destroyed completely, as they are elsewhere, it may easily become impossible to identify places where whole villages once stood.
Sunday, 17 June 2007
Puneyn building 6: their surface already covered with grasses, a few inches more soil and these foundations' edges will be lost completely, the only material evidence of the home's destruction invisible without geophysical archaeological survey or excavation. The stones and wooden logs and branches stored around this site contribute to its developing invisibility.
Behind that are the standing remains of an old stone-built home; if you can imagine soil hillocks following that form (four hillocks, one over each of the corners, perhaps a fifth in the miccle if the structure collapsed inwards), you can imagine what the remains of some of the completely concealed sites, like the old town of Van, looked like before they were concealed.
Those standing remains are still attached to the (I think) two remaining old stone buildings, which show how they would have appeared before their destruction by the Turkish military. (On the far right is a newly-built house.)
As is visible in the foreground, between soil erosion and deposition and ecological colonisation and succession, these remains have disappeared or later will.
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