Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Ancient cities’

Mar 27

31 Comments

Postcards from Petra

On the shelves of a tall bookcase in my parents’ living room, you’ll find a hardcover titled Wonders of the Ancient World. I leafed through it many times as a child and read the book well into my early teens, with many lazy summer afternoons spent engrossed in the tales and pictures of faraway places I could only dream of visiting. What I remember most clearly from that volume is a full-page photograph taken in Petra, Jordan – specifically of the famed rock-cut tomb known as the Treasury (al-Khazneh). Read more

Aug 28

42 Comments

Remembering Bagan

Bagan_1

Last Wednesday, two major earthquakes struck Europe and Southeast Asia within nine hours of each other. As residents slept in the historic towns and villages of central Italy, a 6.2-magnitude tremor rocked the Apennines, taking the lives of at least 290 people. Amatrice, the birthplace of the famous pasta dish spaghetti all’amatriciana, was one of the worst-affected locales. Later that morning, a 6.8 temblor shook the heart of Myanmar. Footage of bricks being torn from an ancient Buddhist stupa seemed eerily familiar, and the reports I read soon confirmed my underlying fears. The quake’s epicentre was roughly 30 kilometres from Bagan, a sprawling archaeological site of 2,200 temples that Bama and I had visited just 10 months before. Read more