TRAVEL

History,
Seen and Unseen

Is the past a creation, a concept, a memory, a wish?

words and photographs by JESSICA ANTOLA

I’ve been rereading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and pondering the nature of history, what is seen and unseen.

In Northern Ethiopia, I once spent time photographing where the Queen of Sheba’s palace is thought to have stood (circa 1000 B.C.E.). I also shot a large algae-green manmade body of water miles away from her palace that was called her Bath. Both felt surreal: former royal and intellectual hubs—centers of civilization—that are now barren. They are lost to another world, far from the teeming big cities of modern-day life. 

In the Syrian desert, I shot around the remains of the ancient Roman Roads (circa 300-500 B.C.E) and the Crusader Forts (circa 11th-13th centuries AD), both of which are still standing. They are tactile reminders of history: The ancient cobblestoned road was marked by chariot wheels, and the walls of the Crusader forts were engraved by the swords of knights riding out into battle on horseback with their blades drawn. I ran my fingers over these marks and felt a visceral connection to the past. 

Archeologists in the Rift Valley discovered the bones of the first human, now on display in the museum in Addis Ababa. Not far away is the palace where one can visit Haile Selassie’s bed enshrined in clear plastic. In the absence of a physical presence, history is kept alive through oral tradition, passed down by the hushed voices of monks: “This is where the Arc of the Covenant resides.”

A passage from Calvino takes hold:

“As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands…The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”