Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (3 page)

In
The City and the City
, China Miéville’s allegory of antagonistic cities that literally cohabit the same space, the inhabitants stay culturally pure by “unseeing” each other and the other place. But the temptation to look is strong, preying on their minds and dominating their every step. This is also true of places that have been replaced and renamed; they manage to be both ghostly and alluring. It is surprising that we haven’t grown blasé about such changes. Over its two millennia the ancient Bulgarian city of Plovdiv has seen twelve such changes. Renaming places became a talisman of progress in the twentieth century. Everything from villages to countries was rebranded, a seemingly simple act that often had profound consequences for their inhabitants. Some involved imposing a new ethno-national identity on an old place. When the Ottoman Empire became “Turkey” in 1923, and Siam “Thailand” in 1939, loosely defined, multiethnic categories were turned into ethnically exclusive ones. Overnight, citizens who were ethnically non-Turkish or non-Thai lost their homeland; they became anomalous and therefore very vulnerable.

Thai and Turkish nationalists claimed that Siam and the Ottoman Empire were ripe for renaming. The Ottoman Empire was defunct, and “Siam” appears to derive from a Hindi word for the region. Ethnic Turks and Thais saw little reason to value the old labels, partly because they were the winners in what appeared to the outside world as a process of indigenization. But things are rarely so simple. The replacement of “Smyrna” by “Izmir” in 1930 records the expulsion of the city’s Greek population and its rebirth as an ethnic Turkish city. The total disappearance in 1946 of “East Prussia” into East Poland and the Soviet exclave of Kaliningrad was also an act of revenge and ethnic cleansing. For hundreds of years this eastern outpost of Prussia had been predominantly German. In a few years the Germans were gone, fleeing west from the Red Army or expelled by Stalin. Yet what Max Egremont calls “the whispering past” of Prussia keeps coming back. Plans to return to the exclave’s main city, also called Kaliningrad, its old German name of Königsberg—a name that reminds people of philosophers, monasteries, and castles rather than Soviet troops—keep being raised then shelved.

Although Petersburg’s communist past is widely reviled, it refuses to curl up and die. Something too important is buried there: everyday struggles and extraordinary dramas. Leningrad’s history makes Petersburg seem shallow. Petersburg was an imperial new town built on the Baltic coast in the eighteenth century by Peter the Great and given a foreign, Dutch-sounding name, Sankt-Peterburg. It faced Europe, the future, and high culture, and away from Russia and its stolid peasantry. Objecting to the displacement of Leningrad by this older but alien rival, the Leningrad-born novelist Mikhail Kuraev used the pages of a Russian literary magazine to claim, “Three hundred years ago the name Sankt-Peterburg sounded to the Russian ear the way Tampax, Snickers, Bounty, and marketing sound to us today.” Kuraev regards Petersburg as an “internal immigrant in its own motherland” but Leningrad as authentically Russian.

Leningrad has earned its place in Russian memory: it is soaked in patriotic and revolutionary blood. It was here that nine hundred days of siege were endured during the Second World War, when a starved people defended and then rebuilt their city from the rubble. It was Leningrad that was awarded the status of “hero-city” by Stalin. Even the city’s Nazi attackers were impressed, and not just by the grim determination of its citizens. Despite its revolutionary credentials, Leningrad was also a center of alternative thinking. The Leningrad Affair of the late 1940s and early 1950s saw many local Communist Party leaders executed or banished as Moscow sought to root out anti-Stalinism.

It is fitting that a Russian exile born in Leningrad, Svetlana Boym of Harvard University, should become an expert on nostalgia. In
The Future of Nostalgia
she offers a complex, sympathetic portrait of the many ways “the duel between the two cities Leningrad and Petersburg continues.” Boym is especially drawn to Leningrad’s bohemian side found in the city’s cafés and suggests that Leningrad lives on as a kind of alternative or second city, recalling critical “potentialities that have not yet been realized.” She is offering us an upbeat message about all those drowned memories, packaging them as a resource for a more liberal city.

But I suspect that turning the usurped city into a bohemian subtext beneath its rival is just another form of forgetting. There appear to be plenty of people in Petersburg whose regret for the death of Leningrad has little to do with this minority political identity. They miss the clear sense of order, the broad social safety net, the respect for the old, the slower pace, the dignity and valor. It may also be the accretion of attachments that keeps Leningrad alive. After all, when it was abolished in 1991 Leningrad had existed for sixty-seven years.

Leningrad may never have quite become the nonconformist city once dreamed of in its alternative cafés, but it was a place of long ordinary years as well as enormous sacrifice. By comparison, today’s Petersburg looks like what the Leningrad-born poet Aleksandr Skidan calls “museumification under the open sky.” In snuffing out Leningrad, some kind of justice has been dealt to the victims of Soviet communism. But the same gesture also erases these victims and myriad prosaic memories.

Leningrad clings on. The world’s first Lenin statue still stands in Lenin Square, although vandals dynamited a large hole in his backside a few years ago. Another of the city’s Lenin statues was almost sliced in two in another bomb blast in 2010. Yet the statues were not demolished but repaired. Wiser citizens know that Petersburg is also Leningrad, that the two must somehow live together. It is not love or even respect that Leningrad needs, but acknowledgment. Like so many other renamed places of the world, the city’s former self appears more troublesome, but also more interesting, and sometimes more alive, than its replacement.

50° 41′ 39″ N, 2° 02′ 29″ W

Arne is an example of a sacrificed place. The village, which sits on a small peninsula sticking out into the English Channel, was evacuated in 1942. Close to where the village stood a decoy factory was built, designed to lure German bombers into dropping their loads short of the Royal Naval Cordite Factory, a sprawling munitions complex a few miles north at Holton Heath.

Decoys were widely employed throughout England during the war. Many were far more elaborate than Arne, since diverting bombers from cities required complex operations. After an air raid on Coventry in November 1940, work started on building massive “Starfish” decoys outside nearly all major urban areas, whose purpose was to fool pilots into thinking they were flying directly over a burning city. By January 1943, more than two hundred Starfish sites had been built. In the early days, tons of random combustible materials were thrown at the task, but as the war progressed the decoys became more sophisticated. Steel tanks, troughs, and pipes were used, and fuel was poured, sprayed, or trickled at timed intervals—an entire symphony of pyrotechnics orchestrated from a control bunker. The brightest was known as the Boiler Fire and periodically released oil from a storage tank into a heated steel tray where it vaporized. Every so often water was dropped into the tray, producing huge flashes of white-hot flame that leaped as high as forty feet. A typical Starfish site might contain fourteen Boiler Fires and burn through twenty-five tons of fuel every four hours.

The Starfish were a great success, and by June 1944 decoy sites had been attacked on 730 occasions. Although Britain’s cities were heavily bombed, the fact that they were not obliterated is in large part a testament to the work of the decoys. In drawing the high explosives and incendiaries onto themselves, they were responsible for saving the lives of thousands of people. Today a few of the control bunkers remain but the decoy sites themselves have disappeared, sinking back into the surrounding landscape.

The decoy at Arne consisted of a network of tar barrels and pipes carrying paraffin, which could be set alight to make it appear from the air as if buildings were on fire. The strategy worked. While hundreds of bombs were dropped on Arne, the factory at Holton Heath escaped almost untouched.

Today Arne is a peaceful and beautiful place. After the war the village was permanently abandoned and lay derelict until the late 1950s. In 1966 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds took over the site and renovated the remaining buildings, including a thirteenth-century church and a former Victorian-era school. The deserted village has become a feature of a nature park that covers much of the peninsula. The bomb craters have become wildlife havens and the gun emplacements are smothered in weeds. Troops of green-clad bird watchers line up in the parking lot, shouldering telescopic sights, on the hunt for rare local species such as the tiny Dartford warbler.

The military landscape may have been swallowed up but it has not been digested: the layering of such a peaceful landscape over such a violent one is unnerving. The sandy, flower-covered heath that dominates Arne is “preserved” and “protected,” but the sense of abandonment lingers on and disturbs the security and comfort that those labels imply. The memory of desperate violence and loss has been veiled here by new associations, but that process also serves to make modern-day Arne appear fragile and temporary.

Arne is one of 250 abandoned villages in Dorset. Some are little more than medieval bumps on the ground, but others are more recent. The most famous twentieth-century example is Tyneham, a village along the coast from Arne that was evacuated in 1943 to allow the army to practice live firing. In the buildup to D-day much of this coast was designated a battle range because of its similarities with the Normandy beaches. In Tyneham a notice was pinned to the church door: “We have given up our homes, where many of us have lived for generations, to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.” But the villagers never came back. Today Tyneham is a collection of derelict stone houses that still sits within a military firing range and, like much of this part of Dorset, remains under the control of the British Army.

A recent archaeological survey concluded that the Arne decoy “had been given over to agricultural use and no features of the decoy survive.” I spent several hours combing the fields, woodland, and reeds at the spot where the decoy is said to have been sited and didn’t find much, at least not much that I understood. There were a few huge bomb craters and two pairs of military gates, broken off their hinges and engulfed with bindweed, but there was little else other than some large wooden pegs, a lot of badly decayed dyed green wood, and a sickly orange tinge to patches of leaf matter. I’m not sure why I expected my amateurish foraging would turn up anything more exciting when archaeologists had already written the place off. I was drawn to the idea that somewhere that burned so brilliantly and dangerously would leave more than just a stain. But all I can claim to have found is an uncertain and quiet trace. My presence disturbed some deer that bolted off into the neighboring wetland. No one had been here for a long time. Arne is a place of lost drama and disconcerting stillness. Its past of fires, bombs, and evacuation gives its present tranquility a disturbing edge. I left the wood and made my way along a narrow causeway between reed beds to a small rocky island covered with gorse bushes. It was a warm, sunny day and I could have lain down and surrendered to the birdsong, but Arne had disoriented me and left me restless.

Some cities are lost while their inhabitants continue to go about their everyday lives. Over the past two decades around 95 percent of the ancient city of Mecca has been demolished. The city has been rebuilt as a set of broad roads, parking lots, and hotel and retail blocks. Even the English name has been upgraded: the Saudis now prefer to call it Makkah.

Today the skyline is dominated by the massive Makkah Clock Tower hotel, a giant Soviet-style Big Ben that soars above the holiest sites in Islam, the Kaaba and the Grand Mosque. The innocent obtuseness of this profanity is caught, albeit unintentionally, on the hotel’s website: “Makkah Clock Fairmont Hotel Tower stands out modestly and respectfully as Makkah’s second mark of distinction with an outstanding clock that can be seen from 17 kilometers away.”

The Mecca building boom has been driven by the need to provide new facilities for the more than three million pilgrims who come every year, but also by the hard-boiled nature of Saudi iconoclasm. For many centuries Islam has prohibited the creation of images of humans or animals, but the kingdom’s puritans have joined forces with property developers to enforce a far more wide-ranging agenda that targets all old buildings and monuments.

As many cities are still learning, sweeping away the past deprives the world of more than just rare and beautiful landscapes. Planners and developers also remove the memories, stories, and connections that hold people together, socially as well as individually. Turning complex, diverse places into shallow, simple ones creates a more culturally vulnerable population, an unrooted mass whose only linking thread lies in the ideology that is fed to them from above.

This process was well understood by those communist regimes that undertook similar mass demolitions in the past. In
The Destruction of Memory
, a profound book on the politics of urban reconstruction, Robert Bevan chronicles the almost fetishistic desire for pulling places down that accompanied the creation and maintenance of state communism. He explains the failure of attempts “to persuade Mao that the new Beijing should be built adjacent to the ancient, sacred city” by pointing out that, for Mao, molding the people to his will demanded the death of the old city. The “obliteration of the past was as much a consideration as the building of the new.”

In the face of puritanical ideologies, whether political or religious, the past takes on a subversive and unruly quality. Old photographs of Mecca show a labyrinthine city, sets of courts, mosques, and alleys piled up on the low hills, a density of periods and influences. Today what little remains of this complex past survives by luck or because it is just too prominent to pull down. Even the most important mosque in Islam, the Grand Mosque, has been under assault. The Saudi antagonism to old buildings is heavily tinged with sectarianism and targets the physical proof that Islam was once practiced in the city in different ways. The long presence of the Abbasid caliphate and then the Ottoman caliphate and empire has been almost entirely expunged, and in the past few years the ancient Abbasid and Ottoman sections on the eastern side of the Grand Mosque have been pulled down.