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When I went to see the ancient city of Persepolis in April I was sadened of how people had carved their names and emblems on 2500year old historical monuments, typycally "Tom was here 1975". It's easy to think this is a relatively new thing, and that people were more respectful in the old days:
I took some pictures of the damage:
So I did some research to find really old carvibgs which may actually contribute something to an old building, and I found something I thought was pretty cool:
In Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, the old Ottoman empire used the building not as a mosque, but as an orthodox church. It wasn't til much later it was converted to a mosque. And get this: the Turkish hired vikings to be a part of their leaderships guard in exchange for trade. And in 1965 they found the ultimate troll carving inside the Hagia Sofia from the 9th century: a viking rune carving saying: "Halvdan carved these runes". 10 years later they found another one by Àrni - or Arne as the name is written today. Even though it doesn't say much about the carving, nor the rest of the sentences in the picture I Googled it and found they had in fact translated all of it with specialists at the University of Bergen. Thought it was pretty cool history, or maybe I'm just a nerd, who knows. Thought I'd share