You can't see it

Two landscapes. Two places. Both places have a soul. Just like people's souls, you can't see them. Portrait photos are sometimes said to reveal a person's soul. Well, they don't. A soul will not fit on a single photograph.
Can a place have a soul? Yes, I think so. The soul comprises someone's past, present, and someday one's future. You can feel the soul of a place if you contemplate about it's past and it's present, and think about what might be it's future. But you can not see it. You can only think that you see it.



About the photographs:

TOP: The Polish village of Czerna, which was once the German village of Tschirne.
After World war II, the German inhabitants were driven out of their homes and expelled to Germany, to make room for Poles who were driven out of their homes by the Soviets. At the 1945 Potsdam Conference the Allied had decided that Poland had to leave a large territory to the Soviet Union in the East, and gain German territory in the West as compensation. It is estimated that between 0.5 and 3 million ethnic Germans lost their lives during the expulsion.

BOTTOM: The Col de la Schlucht in the Vosges Mountains (France).
After winning the Franco-Prussian War the German Empire annexed the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871. The new border between the two countries followed the heights of the Vosges, and the Schlucht Pass became an important border crossing.
The humiliation of defeat and the loss of territory led to widespread revanchist feelings among the French, which in turn was one of the reasons why France was so eager to go to war in 1914.
At the beginning of the hostilities in 1914, French troops used the Col de la Schlucht and other passes to invade Alsace. Their assault was quickly stopped by the Germans, and the front established a few miles west of the border. The next four years a bloody trench war was fought on the summits of the Vosges Mountains.