The Use of Ruins

We embalm the past and call it respect.

One summer night I watched the Vienna Opera Ball performed inside the Coliseum of El Djem, a third-century Roman amphitheater in the Tunisian Sahel, the largest in North Africa, built to hold more people than now live in the town around it. The audience sat on the same stone steps an audience sat on two thousand years ago. Candlelight, warm light on old stone, the grumble of a crowd, a soprano’s line climbing into the dark. It was one of the most beautiful things I have seen, and it felt, unmistakably, like a novelty.

The novelty is the part worth examining, because a concert is the one thing the building was designed for. Before I lived in Tunisia I assumed ruins were to be preserved: fenced, sign-posted, kept sterile, guarded from the crowds that wear them down. That logic fits the Colosseum in Rome and its two million visitors a year. El Djem never sees those numbers. So why did using it for its original purpose feel like a transgression?

Because using it at all has become the strange thing, and that is recent. The amphitheater was a fortress during the Arab conquests; at the time of the French conquest it reportedly held shops and houses; people were still living in the ruins at Dougga at independence. Continuous reuse is the historical norm: the building lasted two thousand years because each age found a use for it. What is new, what is genuinely modern, is the decision to take a thing out of use in order to honor it.

Mark Fisher defined the eerie as a failure of presence or of absence: something present where there should be nothing, or nothing present where there should be something. A preserved ruin is eerie in exactly that key. The stones insist a city was here; the silence insists no one is. And we manufacture the silence (we call it preservation), then we stand in the emptiness we cleared and feel the ghosts we left room for. Fill the place with ten thousand people and an orchestra and the eerie inverts for a night: presence where the absence had been, the ghosts dispersed by sheer warmth and noise. Then the sun comes up, the crowd is gone, the site is a ruin again, and they come back.

I don’t have the name yet for that flip from eerie to alive, but I think I have been looking for the eeriness in the wrong place. It was never in the stones. It was in our decision to keep them empty: to prefer the past as something guarded over something used.