There was a city here

I almost didn’t notice the sign.

Driving through Cheorwon on a research trip last July, we kept passing things that looked like landscape but weren’t: a bridge that ended halfway across a river, a building with no roof, a railway disappearing into trees. There was a lot to see. There wasn’t much left to see it. Our next stop, our guide said, was Gimhwa.

The first thing I noticed was how beautiful it was. Like a corner of paradise. The lake was still. There were birds. There was wind. There was nothing else.

But the longer you looked, the more something else surfaced. A place this quiet has to have been very loud first. Gimhwa’s stillness was not earned. It was left behind.

Wars do not only kill people. They kill places too. That stillness, I would learn, was not peace. It was absence.

I kept thinking: if the trees could speak. If the lake had a language, what would this place say about what it saw, and who it held, and what it lost?

Before the Korean War, Gimhwa was a hub, its roads reaching in all four directions, its mines ranking first or second in the country. It had markets, schools, neighbors who knew each other’s names.

Then the war came. The Battle of Triangle Hill, fought just north of the town in late 1952, lasted six weeks. When it ended, so did Gimhwa. The name stayed on the map. The town did not.

What is left now is a bombed bridge pillar standing alone in the lake, as if still waiting for the rest of the bridge to come back.

A whole city — its roads, its mines, its markets, its 20,000 people — and this is what remained. Not a monument anyone built. Just a thing that survived by accident.

I walked the tracks and thought about the people who had nowhere to run. Some fled north. Some fled south. Some stayed, hid and survived by becoming invisible.

The researcher who guided us that day was the son of one of those who had stayed.

Even after the shooting ended, his father could not tell anyone where he was from. The region had been North Korean territory before the war, and saying you were from here invited a question no one asked out loud: Whose side were you really on? So he said nothing. He carried the name of his hometown like a secret, even in peacetime.

He lived like that for the rest of his life.

Home is not only a place. It is the answer to a question people ask when they want to know who you are. His father had to bury that answer. The war had taken his town, and then the peace had taken his right to mourn it.

There is a saying in Turkish: “When horses fight, it is the donkeys that get trampled.” The people who decided to bomb Gimhwa are remembered in history books, their decisions framed as strategy. The people who lived in Gimhwa are not. They are in the silence of a man who never felt safe saying where he came from.

The ceasefire gets signed, the maps get redrawn and the decision-makers move on. What they leave behind is a loss no treaty restores.

The station itself is not real. It was built decades after the war to mark a place that no longer existed. With nothing left to restore, they built a memory instead: a sign, a platform, tracks leading nowhere.

The sign still says Gimhwa Station. There was a city here. This is how you know.

Munire Nur Sen (muniresen35@gmail.com) is a Turkish writer and Korea Times Global Supporter. She holds an MA in Korean Studies from Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies.