Every wilaya is full of places where something happened — Roman stones in a farmer's field, a kasbah alley, the café where a team was founded, a hill that has a story every grandfather tells differently. Historic pins give that memory an address, so it outlives the people who carry it.
What counts as historic
More than the official monuments. Ruins and old walls, colonial and Ottoman buildings, mausoleums and old mosques, sites of resistance and revolution, abandoned villages, the spring where the town was founded. If people say "this place has a story", it qualifies — the pin is where the story gets written down.
Write the story, not just the name
- Two or three sentences: what happened here, roughly when, and why it mattered to the town.
- Say how you know — "my grandfather worked here", "the plaque says", "documented in the town archive". Honest sourcing beats confident invention.
- Photograph what is actually there today, including decay. A ruin photographed honestly is more moving than a borrowed archive image.
- If the site is on private land or unsafe to enter, say so — the pin is for memory, not trespassing.
Let the pin start a conversation
The best historic pins accumulate: someone adds a date, someone corrects a name, someone posts a photo from 1975. Treat corrections as gifts. Where accounts differ — and for local history they always do — note both versions rather than fighting for one.
Respect what remains
Old sites survive by being left intact. Take nothing, carve nothing, and think before publicising a fragile, unguarded site in detail — sometimes the right pin marks the village viewpoint over the ruins rather than a path through them.
Where Brikoula fits
Open the map of your home town and look at it through the historic pins: suddenly it has depth. Add the story only your family still tells, and it stops being only your family's — it becomes the town's, findable by every visitor and every kid who grows up there.