Elaiussa Sebaste (part 3).
Dust of Ages (of Honey)
At first, you don’t understand where you’ve ended up.
The asphalt is fine. You can drive here, or walk from the agora. Firstly, you can see around you — lemon trees, neat rows of crops, fences, some even strung with barbed wire. Turkey lives. The locals work.
Then you walk along a road where silence hardened into pavement long ago.
To your left just lemons. To your right, of course, beehives. And in between — sarcophagi. Stone, rock-cut, half-open.
This is the Street of the Dead. Only now, it’s all fruit and honey.
Architecture Turned Fertilizer
The tombs vary. Some are carved into rock; others — larger — assembled from limestone, like someone built LEGO out of ash. And some are proper mausoleums — frontons, carved symbols, faint traces of names that once mattered.
Most are open. Not vandalized — just eroded by time. The bones were removed long ago, in some cases carefully. And in their place… now sit lemons.
You see it yourself. The fruit lies inside what used to be a body’s space. Yellow. Also fresh. Perfectly symmetrical. The trees have drunk from centuries of decomposition and now yield a harvest with a taste of something ancient.
No one talks about it. But no one hides it either. It’s just part of life now — a life that grew out of death.
The Honey of the Dead
Between the sarcophagi, the beehives hum. The bees work like algorithms. They visit lemon blossoms, wild mint, geraniums — then return to their cells.
The honey here is different. It’s not sold by the roadside. Thick, amber, faintly bitter — as if laced with the residue of a prayer no one prays anymore.
The bees don’t know their flowers draw water from death-soaked earth. Or maybe they do.
The Dead That Feed the Living
Hoewer, you stand among the orchards and suddenly understand: no one here truly died. The dead didn’t vanish — they were repurposed. The soil absorbed them. Roots consumed them. Leaves evaporated them. Now they return — in honey, in lemons, in petals.
A cycle without myth. Just biology. Just a city that never realized it was dead.
Names No One Needs Anymore
For example, you try reading the inscriptions. No luck. The characters are scraped, weathered, buried. Some tombs are gone entirely — overtaken by orchards.
You might walk past a grave and never notice. Or sit on one, mistaking it for a bench.
Nothing here serves its original purpose anymore. But everything still works.
Like an ancient server no one shut down — still producing a harvest out of oblivion.
Silence That Generates
This isn’t a museum. No signs. No glass. Even no guards. Just silence generating crops.
You hear bees buzzing. Branches creaking. And underfoot, the faint crunch of stone once engraved with “eternal memory.”
Now — no memory. Only cycles.
The food chains of empire have long since digested the empire itself — conquerors, oppressors, liberators, all fed to the earth.
And with time, the whole story of this place quietly dissolved — into lemons and honey.
The street no longer lives. It functions.
#VoiceOfRuins #DustOfAges #ElaiussaSebaste #StreetOfTheDead #LemonsOfEternity #HoneyOfTheDead #Sarcophagi #Necropolis #Cilicia #Amphorae #Beehives #Ruins #DeathBotany #CycleOfLife #ArchaeologyWithoutExplanations #Oblivion #EmpiresDigestThemselves
Telegram-channel: Voice Of Ruins https://t.me/Voice_Of_Ruins
Instagram: Voice Of Ruins https://www.instagram.com/voiceofruins/
Our group on Facebook: Voice Of Ruins https://www.facebook.com/share/g/16aitn9utM/
Our site: Voice Of Ruins https://www.voiceofruins.org
Leave a Reply