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Maps of Places That No Longer Exist

Cartography as memory, and why we keep drawing what we have already lost.

My grandmother kept a hand-drawn map of her childhood village on a single sheet of graph paper. The village had been demolished to make way for a reservoir. She drew it again decades later, labeling each building in careful script.

Maps are not neutral documents. They are arguments. They say: this is real, this exists, this matters enough to be named.

To draw a map of a vanished place is to refuse its vanishing.

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