Ruins

Walking along the massive Roman walls that still (partly) encircle old York, I was struck by the way a Christian town, complete with cathedral, grew inside those magnificent walls from a vanished empire.

As I walked along the parapet, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d seen something like this before — not the literal thing itself, but the general idea.

And then, I had it.

This was very much what it felt like the first time I visited Mumbai and saw Victoria Terminus train station. That magnificent edifice has since been rechristened Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, but no mere name change can hide the pure, beautifully ostentatious high Victorian style of the place.

Today, of course, countless Indian citizens pass through the space and walk beneath its high vaulting ceiling. The Raj is long gone, and with it the hegemony of foreign overlords from England, but the aggressively 19th century British architecture remains.

I wonder how many other such places there are in the world — magnificent monuments to a vanished empire, now part of the every day scenery to another culture.

And part of me cannot help but wonder: Which of those mysteriously evocative relics will one day be all that remains of our own American empire?

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