Layers of the Ground

I spent this morning digging in my small garden patch, trying to clear out the weeds that had taken over while I was away. My hands were covered in dirt, and I kept hitting bits of old brick and rusted metal buried just beneath the surface. It felt like I was excavating a secret history of the house. We tend to think of the ground as something permanent and solid, but it is really just a stack of stories, one on top of the other. Every place we stand has been something else before—a forest, a field, a home, or a place of labor. We walk over these layers every day without a second thought, unaware of the ghosts of what used to be there. It makes me wonder how much of our own history we are currently walking on, and what will eventually be built over the things we leave behind. Does the earth ever truly forget what it once held?

Fidan Nazim Qizi has captured this sense of shifting history in her beautiful image titled Bibiheybat. It is a striking reminder of how our landscapes are constantly reinventing themselves. What do you see when you look at the layers of your own city?