Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Kiledar buildings 13: the masses of stones used to be part of home, pen or terrace wall structures; natural formation processes are now burying them. After these sites' destruction by the Turkish military and the village's resettlement by farmers driven from their homes by an earthquake, they became (or returned to use as) grazing grounds for herds of goat or flocks of sheep.

I'm not sure how damaging the gambling of goats is (although in one abandoned village in southern Cyprus, I was told that they were gradually kicking down the few remaining courses of the dry-stone walls), but natural formation processes are disguising this site. Between the downhill erosion of soil, the animals' excrement and the grass and shrub growth (and even further ecological succession), these stones are millimetre by millimetre being buried.

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