Pinned
From today, I will be moving my main social media home over to Ⓑⓛⓤⓔⓢⓚⓨ.
If anyone wants to get in contact, I will no longer be available here, but you can find me over there: shorturl.at/yKbVV
Paul Cooper
31.7K posts
Paul Cooper
@PaulMMCooper
Novelist & podcast maker｜Wrote River of Ink (2016), All Our Broken Idols (2020)｜Creator of @Fall_of_Civ_Pod｜Now on Bluesky: shorturl.at/yKbVV
- One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France's Red Zone, or "Zone Rouge". Over 100 years ago, the First World War so devastated the landscape here that people are still forbidden to enter, & the zone has become a ghostly & overgrown place.
- One of the world’s most chilling ruins is the Ploutonion at Hierapolis, “the Gates to Hell”. Here crowds watched priests lead animal sacrifices down into a cave, where they died mysteriously as if dragged down to the underworld. And no one knew how they did it until recently.
- As the UK heatwave continues, the shadows of ancient settlements have begun appearing in the fields. Ancient ditches create lines of deeper soil, retaining more moisture and meaning the crops grow thicker. Source: bbc.com/news/amp/uk-wa…
- It has always been Giuseppe Penone's trees for me - the way he finds the memory of the forest hidden inside these big industrial beams.
y’all what is a painting or other work of visual art that never fails to destroy you every time you see it because BOY I’ll start: - The drought in Central Europe has shrunk the rivers & exposed "hunger stones", where people of the past recorded droughts & the famines they caused. One of the stones recently uncovered in the Elbe is carved with the words, "If you see me, weep." Source: npr.org/2018/08/24/641…
- Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships. In their 1st century heyday they held gardens, palaces & baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever.
- One of the world's weirdest ruined & abandoned places is the Pennsylvanian town of Centralia. Its residents were forced to leave by an underground fire that's been burning beneath the town for over 50 years.
- Ghost towns are rarely abandoned all at once. Whether caused by catastrophe or economic change, the decline is usually slow. But the strange story of Varosha, Cyprus, shows how one of the world's most popular tourist destinations became an empty, crumbling ruin overnight.
- A thread on the creative and beautiful ways that the artists of the past repaired the flaws in torn and damaged manuscripts.
- A thread-of-threads on my research into ruins: ancient, modern & imaginary.
