Curdi, India: The Goan Village That Resurfaces Every May

Curdi (also spelled Kurdi) was a fertile, religiously mixed village in Sanguem taluka of South Goa, nestled in the foothills near the Western Ghats and watered by the Salaulim River. By the standards of the region it was prosperous and crowded — home to roughly 3,000 people across some 600 families who farmed paddy and cashew, tapped coconut and lived alongside one another as Hindus, Catholics and Muslims around a shared temple, chapel and shrine. In the mid-1980s it became the first community submerged by the reservoir of the Salaulim Dam, a project built to supply irrigation and drinking water to much of Goa.

The village disappeared beneath the rising reservoir as its roughly 600 families were resettled in the nearby villages of Valkinim and Vaddem, scattering a tight-knit, multi-faith community across the district. Its principal Hindu shrine, the Someshwar Temple, was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt on higher ground near the dam to spare it from the water. What might have been an ordinary story of dam-displacement then took an unusual turn dictated by the reservoir’s own rhythm — each year before the monsoon, when the dam draws down to its lowest level, the water recedes far enough to lay bare the bones of Curdi once more.

Every April and May the cracked, ochre lakebed gives the village back — house foundations and thresholds, old wells, and surviving structures including a hillside chapel and the remains of other temples emerge into the sun. Former residents and their descendants make an annual pilgrimage home, returning across the dry reservoir floor to clean ancestral sites, picnic among the ruins, hold the chapel feast and celebrate the festival of the relocated Someshwar Temple, turning a loss into a recurring act of remembrance and reunion.

Curdi has thus become one of the most poignant of the world’s drowned villages — not a place mourned only in the past tense, but one that reassembles itself every year for a community that refuses to let it vanish. The annual homecoming has drawn growing attention as a moving example of how displaced people keep a destroyed place alive through ritual, even after the dam and reservoir have done their work.

Geamăna, Romania: The Village Drowned in Toxic Sludge

Geamăna was a small Orthodox farming village in the Sesii Valley of the Apuseni Mountains in Alba County, Transylvania, home to several hundred families who lived by subsistence agriculture and herding around their village church. In 1978 Romania’s communist government ordered the valley evacuated — not to build a reservoir for water or power, but to use it as a tailings pond for the enormous Roșia Poieni copper mine being developed nearby, one of the largest copper deposits in Europe.

Residents — variously reported as around 400 families, more than a thousand people in total — were offered modest compensation and told to leave so the valley could become a settling basin for the mine’s waste. From 1978 onward a rising tide of tailings — a slurry laced with heavy metals, cyanide and sulfuric acid — began to fill the valley, slowly burying homes, gardens, fields and the cemetery beneath a thick, multicoloured sludge. Over the following decades the level climbed by roughly a metre a year; by the 1990s it had reached the village church, leaving only its spire and a scatter of rooftops protruding above the surface.

Unlike a water reservoir, this flood does not recede. Because the Roșia Poieni mine has continued to operate, the tailings keep accumulating and the toxic lake keeps rising, threatening even the church spire that has become the village’s grim landmark. A handful of residents — only around twenty by recent accounts — long refused to leave, clinging to houses on the upper slopes above the advancing waste, while the once-fertile valley has been transformed into a basin of rust-red, ochre, green and turquoise water whose colours come from the iron, copper and sulfur compounds suspended in it. The basin now spans well over 130 hectares and holds tens of millions of tonnes of waste.

The site has become an internationally recognised symbol of the human and environmental cost of mining. Photographers, journalists and environmental campaigners are drawn to the eerie, oddly beautiful lake and to the half-sunken church, which stands as a monument both to the village that was sacrificed and to a contamination that, unlike floodwater, will not drain away.