Memento Mori

Cyprus gave copper its name. The Latin cuprum, the English copper, the French cuivre all derive from Kypros. For thousands of years, the island's economy and identity were inseparable from what came out of the ground. Some of the mines and quarries ceased to exist, and Cyprus moved on as if this history belonged to someone else. The wounds in the earth are still there. Vast, open, irreversible. But the men who made them are gone. Their absence is not absence of memory. It is absence of record. What they knew, what they carried in their bodies, what they passed without words, disappeared with them. Only these places remain. And the places do not speak in a language anyone thought to learn. Memento Mori. Remember that you will die. Not consolation. Witness. What was here mattered. We forgot it before it was even gone.