Yeongsanpo’s Steady Erasure

By Isaiah Winters

Yeongsanpo in Naju harbors a lot of history. The former river port is linked to Joseonera tax collection, Japanese-era origins of industry and Christianity, plus the modern-era erasure of much of this fascinating past. Seeing hints of redevelopment on the horizon, I recently stopped by to see how the area was doing and record some of its most at-risk quarters. All that I saw is far beyond the scope of this column’s humble June edition, but I’ll share with you some of the better finds in the limited space that I have.

Dueling Denominations

My visits to Yeongsanpo always begin the same way: I park in front of Yeonggang Temple and weave my way on foot along the neighborhood’s curvy roads to the top of the nearest hill, where I check in on the abandoned “Moonie” church. Overlooking the entire port area, the unique A-frame chapel associated with the Unification Church must have cut an imposing figure when it opened on June 1, 1979. Now 44 years on, it still dwarfs any other building on the hill and stares out across the main road at its Presbyterian rival, the far older Yeongsanpo Church atop the opposite hill. Made of dark stone and set among lush church grounds, the senior chapel has roots stretching back to Christianity’s arrival in Naju in 1908.[1] The location of each church appears to have been very deliberately picked, as they both form the pinnacle of their respective hills overlooking the river port. For now, the battle over Yeongsanpo’s soul goes to the more established denomination.

As for the Moonie church’s condition, it’s been abandoned for some time and seems to be emptier and emptier every time I visit. Once lined with pews stretching from front to back, the chapel is now almost entirely free of them, though I spotted one maybe half a kilometer away from the church in a roadside gutter. Apparently, elderly locals use it to sit, rest, and observe the changing hillside around them. Also long gone are the self-aggrandizing scrapbooks often found inside Moonie churches. They tend to contain news clippings about the church’s global reach with an inordinate focus on its founder, Moon Sun Myung (문선명). In this Yeongsanpo chapel, there used to be one such scrapbook detailing Moon’s sweeping tour of the U.S., though it’s since disappeared. Sometimes the church is locked up and inaccessible; other times, it’s wide open. It’s always hit or miss when visiting the “Moonie bin.”

WHAT’S ALREADY BEEN LOST

Head down the Moonie hillside’s many winding, bamboo-lined alleys, and you’ll end up at the main road separating Yeongsanpo’s pair of prominent hills. After crossing over, I like to check in on a burned-out home nestled along an alley of old inns. The home is wide open and still contains many of the charred artifacts of the family that once lived there. I’m no expert in fire damage assessment, but the most badly damaged part of the house looks to be the kitchen, where the melted appliances suggest an electrical fire did the place in. This time, I felt a little braver than usual and so entered the main living area as cautiously as possible. The roof still stands overhead, though on deeply charred pillars the color of obsidian. Among the shelves of sootcovered knickknacks, I found two heat-warped family photos together in a single frame. Finds like these are always worth the risk.

Another part of this area that’s done for is the old Yeongsanpo Cinema. Until very recently, the iconic cinema was located along Naju’s hongeo geori (홍어 거리), which is a string of restaurants still well known for serving fermented skate – arguably Korea’s hardest cuisine to stomach and a must-try dish for any visitors to Honam. According to one source, the cinema opened sometime before the Korean War, during which it was damaged by bombing.[2] It remained a cinema until the 1970s and, despite no longer screening pictures after that, retained an old-timey, retro façade with old movie posters and a tiny ticket box that visitors could peruse on their way to munch some ammonia-flavored ray. On a visit to Yeongsanpo years ago with my friend Ryan Berkebile, he managed to slip through an opening and get inside the shuttered theater. When asked to recall what he’d seen at the time, he said, “What I remember is that they’d turned it into a dance club with a karaoke stage. It had a major 90s vibe. There were naked women in frosted glass on the doors.” Sounds like it went the way of the “colatec” before being bulldozed earlier this year.

Losses To Come

All the way up the hill behind the former cinema is a large swath of bulldozed earth that originally caught my attention, prompting me to stop the car in the first place. At the top of this hill is the aforementioned Yeongsanpo Church made of stone, a C-shaped clutch of hanok houses around it, and the, at times, impossibly narrow walkways connecting them all together. Some of the traditional homes around the church have already been bulldozed to make way for whatever’s next, though quite a few of these old structures remain. One in particular struck me as being oddly proportioned, which sometimes happens with really old homes. I’ve got no eye for dating Korean architecture, but my hanok-restoring friend, Kang Dong-su, does, so I messaged him and said he should visit the area while it was in the sweet spot between eviction and demolition.

Fortunately, he soon did and was able to observe huge historical shifts in the building styles of that one oddly proportioned hanok. In that house, which had been approved for use all the way back in 1925, he saw thick beams and pillars typifying late-Joseon-era structures built for the nobility, and these were overlaid by thinner, Japanese-style rafters that extended out over the original Korean ones. Seeing Korean-style beams topped with Japanesestyle extensions and tiles speaks to the architectural palimpsest of structures built in the area just 100 years ago, which had one foot in the Joseon era and the other in the Japanese occupation era. In this way, Yeongsanpo’s history stares us in the face from every crumbling alley, but it’s often hard to meet its gaze. I hope this short article has helped pique your interest in the area’s rich architectural history, which you should explore for yourself before it’s too late.

Sources

[1] Yeongsanpo Church. (n.d.). 영산포교회 [Yeongsanpo Church]. http://yspch.kr/

[2] Wanna Maker. (2017, November 12). 나주극장 영산포국장 [Naju’s Cinema Is Yeongsanpo Cinema]. https://blog.naver.com/apoyando/221138410895

Ryan Berkebile’s Instagram: @naturaryan1600

Kang Dong-su’s Instagram: @baemui.naru

Hailing from Chino, California, Isaiah Winters is a pixel-stained wretch who loves writing about Gwangju and Honam, warts and all. He’s grateful to have written for the Gwangju News all these years. More of his unique finds can be seen on Instagram @d.p.r.kwangju and YouTube at Lost in Honam.