경주시 - Gyeongju
June 23 - 24, 2024
Some places live in history books. Others breathe it. Gyeongju is one of those places. Nestled in the mountains of western South Korea, this ancient capital of the Silla Dynasty isn’t just a city—it’s an open-air museum, a landscape carved by kings and warriors, poets and scholars, monks and mystics. It’s a place where the past isn’t locked behind doors and glass cases, but sprawled out in the rolling hills, where time feels like it moves differently, folding in on itself.
I had been waiting for this leg of the journey, counting down the days. As someone who spends most of their time neck deep in archaeology, chasing down remnants of the past isn’t just a passion—it’s a compulsion. And Gyeongju? This was the place. The last breath of the Silla Dynasty, the remnants of the Three Kingdoms period, an ancient world still etched into the bones of the land. This city is a treasure chest of tombs, temples, and ruins, a place where emperors sleep beneath towering earthen mounds, where Buddhist monks still chant their prayers into the wind, and where the very earth hums with a history so deep it feels almost supernatural.
And yet, despite all the textbooks, the documentaries, the research—nothing quite prepared me for Gyeongju. Maybe it was the sheer weight of history pressing down on the place. Maybe it was the peaks of the mountains around us that stood like silent sentinels, holding secrets that would never fully be unearthed. Or maybe it was the fact that, like all great places, it defied expectations.
Because nothing was as it seemed.
It wasn’t just ruins and relics. It was more—something you had to feel rather than see. It was the air, thick with the scent of foliage and earth after a fresh rain. It was the quiet reveré of the tourists who moved through the city like they knew they were treading on sacred ground. It was the knowledge that this was the last known place where a tiger had been spotted on the Korean Peninsula during the colonial period—a ghost story wrapped inside a city of ghosts.
Gyeongju was a reminder that history isn’t just a thing to be studied. It’s a thing to be lived, to be walked through, to be inhaled with every breath. And as we stepped into this city of echoes, I knew we were about to experience something far beyond what any history book could ever teach us.
