The aftermath of Oradour’s War
We set up the machine guns in the barn, weighing their tripod legs down with heavy chunks of firewood. When the men were shepherded in they saw the black gun muzzles and began to panic, shouting out warnings to their fellows in back. We answered with soft words, hushed voices, our hands on our pistols. “Only the sympathizers”, we soothed. “You’re free to go if you’re not a sympathizer. Are you a sympathizer?” They shook their heads and filed in.
We took to the guns and shot them all in the legs. The muzzle-flashes lit the glum barn like a lightning storm, the torrential explosion of munitions its own rolling wave of thunder. Afterwards was a moment of silence, then the moaning began. None of us wanted to venture into that tangle of thrashing limbs, so we tossed buckets of gasoline over the bucking creatures nearest to us, followed by a sparking flare. The place flamed to life like Dante’s Inferno. We didn’t even wait for the screaming to stop before heading off to blow up their families.
Oradour-sur-Glane is a village in west-central France. The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site and the original has been maintained as a memorial.
Photo by Ramos Andrade.
Dunes envelop the Namibian toytown of Kolmanskop
One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown houses in neat little rows, serviced them with a tinker rail-line, then sat back and sighed in contentment. The next day he walked away and left the toytown to the sands.
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the deserts of Namibia, built by the DeBeers mining company in 1908, abandoned in 1956 after diamond prices crashed. The town is named after a transport driver named Jonny Coleman (Kolman) who took shelter from a sandstorm on a hill (Skop) in the vicinity.
Kolmanskop toytown, drifting into the dunes.
Top 5 Japanese Ghost Towns
Common wisdom about Japan says it`s a tiny island with a serious premium on space, leading to real estate prices in the cities higher even than the most exclusive blocks of Manhattan. The thought that there might be whole abandoned towns on this island seems a paradox- how could a country with so little space abandon anything?
Well, they do.
Ghost Towns are the ultimate haikyo (ruins exploration) experience. If you long to be Indiana Jones, this is where you need to go. This is where the mystery is. In the doctor’s office the scalpels are laid out for surgery. Battered wooden apartments are still filled with the weathered remnants of their old occupants. Doors hang open, plates sit with long-rotten food, calendars are still marked for some future date, left as they were.
Most ghost towns in Japan are built around mines, like abandoned gold rush towns in the American West. When the mine seams gave out the jobs went away and the people left. Soon, the place was abandoned.
Let`s take a look at 5 of Japan`s best.
The 1937 Chevy at Bodie ghost town
Bodie is a ghost town east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Mono County, California, United States, about 75 miles southeast of Lake Tahoe. It has been administered by California State Parks since becoming a state historic park in 1962, and receives about 200,000 visitors yearly.
The ash-flooded town of Chantai
On my Artificial Owl post last week I wondered aloud if I might try my hand at re-posting photos of ruins sites from around the world. Well, I spent the week on and off scouring for something interesting, that I hadn’t seen before, that wasn’t already so exposed that everybody knows what it is. It’s actually quite a hard thing to do- involving lots of time spent scrolling through image lists generated by key word searches, looking for something that stands out and is ruined.
Hmm, well. Here I present to you:
The ash-flooded town of Chantai, in Chile.
I’m still not sure if it’ll become a regular feature of this site, so this post is basically a test balloon.
Gunkanjima Opens
Gunkanjima opens to the public! The famed ‘Battleship Island’, properly Hashima island- formerly a haikyo Holy Grail, has now been opened to tourists to ‘explore’ along a specially built walkway. The cost of the trip is 4,000yen, including the ferry ride out to the dilapidated island. Tourists have up to one hour (weather permitting) to wander the walkway before they have to re-board the ferry and leave.
This is great in some ways- the island will be preserved, vandals will be stopped from gaining access as security will be doubtless beefed up. But for the same reason, any proper exploration of the island will now be virtually impossible. It’s a live site again.
UER has a ton of photos and text about this place- including many more photos by Kuroneko, amongst others. The following text by
‘As days passed on the island, my impression of it began to change greatly. The innumerable articles left behind, all shrouded in dust, rusted,to me at first seemed merely drifting toward death. Yet, from one point in time, they started to look vivid, and beautiful. I thought perhaps the island, while appearing to fall deep asleep, had gradually commenced to awaken, the day it was deserted.’
Video from Dotokou, a man who grew up on the island, and revisits before it was opened to the public. Haunting. English subtitles.
Brian Burke-Gaffney writes a great article on Gunkanjima.
The Gunkanjima ferry info can be accessed from this site.
Thanks to Miki for tipping me off on this.
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