For the past several years, I photographed the sites where history took a turn and death had seeped into the landscape of my native Europe, in a search for its collective memory and to understand its differences with the country I adopted.
The physical scars of these sites have long gone and what seems to be an idyllic or an unremarkable pastoral scene turns more poignant once we know its traumatic history, challenging our notion of understanding place.
With no direct evidence of battle left, subtle happenstance features in the land become symbolic references to what happened so many years and centuries ago, like the tracks cut through the fields of “Verdun, Le Mort Homme†or “Kursk†remind us of the armory that crossed the hills.
The blood dark sea of Lepanto alludes to a description of the post battle scene as 'mare tutti sanguinoso' by a 16th century Italian historian.
Strewn rock depicted in the photographs of several ancient battle sites like Troy, Cannae and Thermopylae are silent testimonies of both antiquity and of the numerous fallen ones.
The burnt patch of land I found on the infamous Mamaev Kurgan in Stalingrad fit the Soviet writer and journalist Vasily Grossman's words about this epic battle :
“And the war entered the city and scorched itâ€.