Sandro Fabbrini Photography - Sandro Fabbrini Photography

Battles Within: The Forgotten Asylum

In the heart of the Belgian countryside, nestled amidst rolling hills and the Ardenne’s ancient forests, stands the Domain du Celly, a stony castle shrouded in mystery and melancholy.

Once a beacon of hope, it had transformed into a silent sentinel of forgotten memories, haunted by the ghosts of wars long past.

During the tumultuous years of the First and Second World Wars, the Domain du Celly had been repurposed as a hospital, a sanctuary for wounded soldiers seeking solace and healing.

Its walls had witnessed the agony of battle-scarred bodies and shattered minds, its corridors echoing with the cries of pain and the whispers of lost souls.

Now, decades later, the castle stood abandoned, a relic of bygone eras.

Moss and mould crept along its weathered stones, claiming dominion over the once-grand halls and echoing chambers. Within, the remnants of its past lay frozen in time.

Patient' papers spilled from toppled cabinets, a testament to lives once documented and now forgotten. In the dim light filtering through cracked windows, a lonely wheelchair stood sentinel in a desolate corridor, a silent witness to the suffering it had once borne.

In the main halls, where warmth once emanated from a roaring fireplace, now lay a heap of trash, the flames extinguished long ago.

An old armchair sat amidst the debris, a throne of decay in a kingdom of ruin.

The once-elegant bathrooms had become graveyards of shattered porcelain, with broken toilets scattered like fallen soldiers up on the cold, tiled floors.

Shattered mirrors reflected not the faces of those who once sought their reflection, but instead, the greenish hue of the ceilings above.

Rotting mattresses lay half-disemboweled up on their rusted spring boxes, a mockery of the comfort they once offered.

And in the silence of the castle, lost minds still wandered, spectral echoes of soldiers long gone, searching endlessly for the fragments of their shattered lives.

Despite the passage of time, the Domain du Celly remained frozen in its own haunting history, a monument to the human cost of war, where the souls of the fallen lingered, trapped within its crumbling walls, forever seeking peace that could never be found.