Yesterday we stumbled upon Apollonia Salbake, and as I learned about it, I realised how completely time has forgotten this place.
Forgotten walls.
Forgotten graves.
Forgotten history
Stone walls that fell with the last earthquake,
lifted, carried away, reused,
set into other buildings
that do not remember
what they replaced.
People forgot the tears.
Forgot the laughter that once moved
between these hills.
Forgot the weight of hands
pressing farewell into carved rock.
Only a few names remain,
cut into stone
with such certainty.
Names that only scholars pronounce now,
carefully,
as if speaking them too loudly
might disturb a silence
that has already erased them.
A few coins were found.
The faces on them
have no names left.
They lie in museums
where visitors drift past glass
without seeing
the vanished market,
the vanished hands,
the vanished ambition.
The women who once held a place here,
who stood with more visibility
than in other kingdoms,
who were named, honoured, remembered
in stone and ceremony,
are now only faint letters
softened by centuries.
Their authority did not survive the dust.
Their presence did not survive the forgetting.
Even the trees are gone.
The ones planted for shade,
for fruit,
for hope of continuation.
No root marks the ground.
No trunk leans into the sky.
No leaf trembles with inherited memory.
The hill does not testify.
The wind does not retell.
This is not a ruin that longs.
Not a city waiting to be rediscovered.
It is abandonment so complete
that not even the past
remembers being here.
Apollonia Salbake
is not silent.
It has been
unremembered.
