MY GYEONGJU (SOUTH KOREA) PHOTOGRAPH MEMOIR

Book excerpt: Gyeongju, now a mid-sized modern city in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), was 1,400 years ago the capital of the Silla Kingdom. From 57 BCE to 935 CE, Gyeongju was the cultural, religious and administrative capital of a unified Korean state and the first true capital of Korea up to that time. In that ancient period, Gyeongju was three to five times larger than it is today. Filled with palaces, Buddhist temples and monuments, only a few remnants remain of the Silla Kingdom today. Nevertheless, those few historic sites are an impressive window into what the Silla era was like. The author visited these beautiful places to understand something about this part of Korean history. This work examines the five significant places in Gyeongju that bespeak of this city’s rich cultural and historic past as the former capital of ancient Korea.