“Cursed is the ground because of you!”
In the opening pages of the Bible (Genesis 3,17), God adresses to Adam who, because of his disobedience, will be expelled together with Eve from the Garden of Eden to survive in a barren land; with pain and sweat he’ll work there and there he’ll come back, where his life originated.
Since that time thousands of years have passed and the land itself has become the home of “humanity that has found the most effective ways to curse herself.” Works of all sorts have been invented, and the plowing and pastoralism aren’t to be counted among the most ungrateful.
But as we know the curse of a land it doesn’t always have to do with the work of man. In the collective unconscious, it recalls words like “superstition”, “mystical”, “darkness” and … “death”: the places defined as cursed have always had a certain appeal because silence and mystery surrounding them or climatic conditions adverse who live there – almost to the limit of the supernatural – attract and repel with the same intensity.
A village suspended on the rock,
an area overrun by bats,
a poisoned lagoon,
underground mines,
a suicide forest,
a diabolical colonial house
are just some of the places that you can find in Atlas of cursed places, written by the journalist and author Olivier Le Carrer. And remember: “The charm of the unknown dominates everything.”
Time of reading: a couple of weeks
Photography: Sara Cartelli.
© The Eat Culture.
