The places that stop you completely, the ones that make you stand still in a crowd and feel, without any warning, like you are about to cry and cannot explain why, those places are, above all, rarely beautiful by accident. They are beautiful because of what they survived. And we need to start talking about that honestly.
Hallstatt, Austria: the village that painted its dead
You have seen it on Pinterest. The impossibly still lake, the mountains rising so steeply on either side that the village consequently feels grown rather than built. Four hundred travel captions have consequently called it a fairytale.
What those captions never mention is that Hallstatt ran out of burial space in the nineteenth century and consequently solved the problem by exhuming its dead, painting their skulls with flowers and names, and displaying them in a charnel house that still exists and is still, above all, openly visited today. Hallstatt is gorgeous. Hallstatt is also a village that painted its dead and put them on shelves. Both things are, simultaneously, completely true.
Adalaj Vav, India: a monument built on a broken promise
There is a stepwell in Ahmedabad so extraordinarily carved and so obsessively detailed that architects still cannot fully explain how it was built in 1499. Furthermore, most visitors stand inside it, feel inexplicably moved, and consequently never find out why. A queen named Rudabai commissioned it as a gift to her husband. He was subsequently killed in battle before it was completed. The sultan who killed him consequently offered to finish the construction, on the condition that Rudabai marry him.
She agreed. The well was completed. And on the wedding day, she consequently walked to the top and threw herself into it. The well still stands. Extraordinarily beautiful. Extraordinarily intact. Now you know what you are feeling when you stand inside it.
Pompeii, Italy: the city that history froze mid-sentence
Pompeii is, without doubt, the most visited archaeological site in the world. Furthermore, it is also, above all, the most quietly devastating. In 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius consequently buried an entire Roman city so completely and so suddenly that the people inside it were, in every sense, frozen mid-life. A man covering his face. A dog is still chained to a post. A family consequently huddled together in a room that offered, ultimately, no protection at all.
Moreover, what makes Pompeii extraordinary is not the destruction. It is, above all, the ordinary life that the destruction consequently preserved, the graffiti on the walls, the election posters, the menu boards outside restaurants, the children’s footprints in the floors of family homes.
Vesuvius did not just bury a city. It consequently froze an entire civilisation mid-sentence. And we are, quite remarkably, still reading it.
Varosha, Cyprus: the beach resort that stopped in 1974
Furthermore, there is a beach resort in Cyprus called Varosha that was, in 1974, one of the most glamorous holiday destinations in the entire Mediterranean. Elizabeth Taylor consequently holidayed here. Richard Burton followed. The hotels were, above all, full. Then, overnight, war arrived. The residents consequently fled with whatever they could carry, believing they would return within days. They never did.
Varosha has consequently sat empty for over fifty years, an entire resort town of hotels, restaurants, and shops frozen exactly as its residents left them. Clothes still hanging in shop windows. Cars consequently rusting in driveways. Calendars, above all, are still open to August 1974. It is, without doubt, one of the most haunting places on the planet. And it was, consequently, once just someone’s favourite holiday destination.
This is what this newsletter is about
Every week, I will bring you a place. I will tell you what it looks like, honestly, without the filter. And then, above all, I will tell you what happened there. Because knowing the real story of a place is, consequently, the only thing that transforms travel from consumption into understanding.
If this moved you, subscribe. Share it with one person who would consequently feel the same. This newsletter is always free. Because these stories, above all, belong to everyone.
Next week, the most romantic city in the world and the extraordinarily dark reason it consequently became that way.
(Subscribe to find out which one.)
Want to travel to any of these places with someone who actually understands their history? The Safar Travels consequently exists for exactly that reason.