Creepily gorgeous and mysterious, Old Valyeria was once home to ‘Dragon Lords’ and ‘Dragon Riders’ (which are exactly what their titles imply) before it was wiped out by ‘The Doom of Valyeria’ which was a volcanic eruption which also created the ‘Smoking Sea’ this ghost city overlooks (see top image).

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One of the show’s protagonists Tyrion upon seeing it asks, “How many centuries before we learn how to build cities like this again?” (Benioff and Weiss, 2015) Unfortunately, there were no gorgeous ghost cities once home to dragon lords nearby so to interpret this image I settled for this boat ride through a particularly green river with plenty of forestries and then added some smoke through the magic of photo editing (see bottom image).

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With the eruption of this volcano, many of Old Valyria’s mysterious wonders all but became extinct. Primarily, dragons, dragon riders, and Valyrian Steel. The land is now believed to be haunted and serves as a quarantine for severe Greyscale patients, a highly infectious disease that turns the skin into a scaled or stone-like texture. Once the scaling spreads to the whole body, the patient becomes violent and insane. Many travelers don’t even dare to pass by the abandoned city for fear of Greyscale patients.

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This lends itself to some greater concepts. For example, “the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of space are closely linked to the ways in which space is physically organized …. space has been arranged and rearranged for human use” (O’Brien, Szeman, 2017). When referring to the physical organization of Old Valyeria we can think of the irony that the city which once belonged the fire breathing dragons and their riders were consumed by the very volcano that this magical power may have been born from. It also seems fitting that the once wonderfully magical city is now home to terrifying Greyscale patients in its abandonment, an example of changing symbolism as we organize our spaces and rearranging spaces for human use.