Ani

40° 30' 27" N, 43° 34' 21"

Once home to upwards of 200,000 inhabitants, this medieval city-state now sits empty and slowly crumbling on the Turkish-Armenian border. I found out about this fantastic location just a few days ago while researching Gunkanjima [post soon to come], and came across a shamefully neglected Wikipedia category: Ghost Towns in Asia.

A wonderful website on the Ani ruins can be found here, featuring a map with lengthy descriptions on each individual site, complete with pictures. Of particular interest are the comparison images, showing the buildings as they appeared when (presumably) they were first photographed (around the turn of the century), and the amount of damage that has occurred (both by natural phenomena and intentional acts).

Sidebar:

Cultural cleansing of Ani, centuries-old Bhutanese Buddhist manuscripts being slowly eaten by worms, Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley... as has always happened, Alexandria et al, we are losing the history of our species by casual indifference and acts of hate.

It's nothing new, and I don't mean to be up on a soapbox. I'm not so idealistic as to believe we can restore these places, or even preserve most. It's our own fear of being forgotten which drives us - well, some of us - to try to preserve the memory of who we have no memory of. But, eventually, the Sahara will consume Timbuktu, and the mud wall madrasas will be gone forever.

My current employment finds me working with software that could, while not preserve such relics in original form, certainly preserve them electronically. Photosynth could save architectural wonders from ruin; Seadragon could preserve crumbling manuscripts, and, given the sudden new durability of ancient documents in a digital medium, would open their viewing up to the entire world.

Will this happen? I don't know. We have a responsibility to restore places and things of the people who came before us; it is a record of who we are. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre makes their attempts, but just as with my ideas as to how the aforementioned Photosynth and Seadragon ought to be applied, where there's no money to be made, there's no interest to be had.