<
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/south-koreas-worst-ever-wildfires-ravage-ancient-buddhist-temples-and-menace-historic-villages-180986324/>
"The largest wildfires in South Korea’s history have blazed for seven days,
leaving dozens dead and destroying or severely damaging several of the
country’s most revered historical sites.
As of Thursday, 27 people have died and at least 37,000 have been evacuated
from their homes, the
New York Times’ Jin Yu Young reports. The fires have
ravaged 88,000 acres in the country’s southeast and are showing few signs of
slowing.
“Damages are snowballing,” South Korea’s prime minister and acting president
Han Duck-soo said in a televised address yesterday, according to Kim Tong-Hyung
and Hyung-Jin Kim of the
Associated Press.
“There are concerns that we’ll have wildfire damages that we’ve never
experienced, so we have to concentrate all our capabilities to put out the
wildfires in the rest of this week,” the president added.
The fires have not spared Korea’s sacred cultural heritage sites, destroying at
least 18 designated heritage sites,
Reuters’ Nicoco Chan and Hongji Kim
report.
One of the most staggering losses is the 1,300-year-old Gounsa temple complex
in Uiseong County, around 90 miles southeast of Seoul. Monks started the temple
in 681, as the Silla dynasty promoted Buddhism across the unified Korean
Peninsula.
While no Silla-era structures lasted to the present day, Gounsa is still an
active Buddhist site, filled with buildings, statues and artifacts from the
intervening centuries. As witnesses recall, however, the fire swiftly consumed
this history.
“There was a wind stronger than a typhoon, and flames whipped through the air
like a tornado, burning the whole area in an instant,” Gounsa temple chief
Deungwoon tells
Reuters. “The buildings and remains of what Buddhist monks
have left over 1,300 years are now all gone.”
Parts of Gounsa have burned before, but never to this extent. The Korea
Heritage Service reports that the fire completely destroyed 20 of the 30
buildings at the complex, per the AP’s Hyung-Jin Kim. Two “national treasure”
sites—Gaunru, a revered stream-side pavilion from 1668, and Yeonsujeon Hall,
built to store genealogical records of the royal family—succumbed to the blaze.
“I went there this morning and found they’ve been reduced to heaps of ashes,”
Doryun, a senior monk who used to live at the temple, tells the
AP. “I feel
really empty. Life is transient.”"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
