A day of war in Seoul

Seoul is a city of contradictions. Hypermodern and ancient. Bubble tea and barbed wire. It’s a city that rebuilt itself from ash and artillery, where the past isn’t a distant echo but a constant hum in your ear. It screams its history from concrete and steel, neon lights and scarred monuments. Whether you’re sipping espresso in Gangnam or slurping kimchi stew in a back-alley hideout, the war never feels that far away.

I am sitting in a dark room at a hostel in Seoul, where I found a computer with questionable internet connection. My mind is still trying to recover from an exhausting day of warfare study. Earlier this morning I looked into North Korea with binoculars, seeing their flag shaking defiantly in the wind on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

At the 38th parallel. The DMZ is the world’s most heavily fortified border.

Korea is a country tragically divided into two parts, separating families and friends. Standing as a scar between North and South Korea is the DMZ, a testament to the failure of resolution. The guide politely advised to “please stay away from the land mines”. I had no trouble at all in following that advice.

There is a concept in Korea called “han”, a feeling of collective oppression. In some ways it seems similar to the Turkish “hüzün” or the Portuguese “saudade”, but the wishful longing is replaced by a more desperate agony.

The only bridge connecting North Korea with South Korea.

After that I went back to Seoul and visited the War Memorial, a vast area filled with the bloodstained history of battle and strife. The halls told the sad story of killing, slaughtering and pillaging in the region. Outside the building, a lot of vessels were on display, objects created by humans to kill humans. There’s something disconcerting about watching a six-year-old pose for a photo in front of a Sherman tank, next to B52 bombers and AAC missiles. But maybe that’s the point, as war seems to be normalized here, sanitized, but never erased.

I find it sad that the human history is so extremely focused on bloodshed. Is it really that necessary to attack other people just because they have chosen to live on another side of some man-made fictional border on a map? The desire to divide people is a familiar theme I’ve encountered many times before. In Berlin there are still traces of the Wall left. When I crossed the island of Cyprus, the tension between the northern Turkish part and the southern Greek part could be felt in the air.

How fragile we are.