‘The ruins are still standing’, the writer Brian Dillon once quipped, ‘but what do they stand for?’ Martin Devecka, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the latest in a long line of scholars to attempt to answer this question in his book Broken Cities.
At its heart, Broken Cities is a collection of essays on the shifting cultural understanding of ruins across history, in the form of four case studies: Classical Greece, ancient Rome, Baghdad and the vanished Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. But the book also aims to be a potted history of the evolution of the idea of the ruin up until the end of the 16th century.
It is a common enough observation that the ruin is not an inert object. Throughout history, the crumbling walls of ancient cities have formed battlegrounds for meaning. Dictators have enrolled them into official propaganda, European explorers have claimed ownership of them, while local people have spun folklore about them, even as they used them as quarries.
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