- #Glimpses soviet ghost town norwegian isle manuals
- #Glimpses soviet ghost town norwegian isle series
Nearby, Sergei and I walked around inside the long-emptied swimming pool - once heated, and the envy of the residents of Longyearbyen, the much larger Norwegian settlement to the south. The old cultural center houses what’s likely the northernmost grand piano and gymnasium. (The settlement is around 500 miles farther north than Utqiargvik, Alaska, the northernmost community in the United States.) If something exists in Pyramiden, then it is very probably the northernmost example in the world. The town’s offerings included a school, a library, an ice hockey rink, a sports hall, dance and music studios, a radio station, a cinema that doubled as a theater and a cemetery for cats. In its heyday, Pyramiden provided its 1,000 residents with urban facilities and a high standard of living. Perhaps most poignant were the children’s toys, scattered among what was once a schoolhouse. There were scattered journals, photographs of men with impressive mustaches, a typewriter - even an old basketball, burst at the seams.
#Glimpses soviet ghost town norwegian isle manuals
Manuals sat open, bottles of vodka were left on windowsills. Conversely, in summer, the sunlight is unyielding for more than three months.Īnd yet, walking around with Sergei, I couldn’t help but sense that things had moved quickly in the end. When the sun disappears below the horizon each fall in late October, it isn’t seen again until mid February of the following year.
Accidents in the mine, financial turmoil in Russia and a 1996 charter plane crash that killed 141 people combined to seal its fate.Īt over 78 degrees north, Pyramiden is a place of records and extremes.
In truth, the place had been in pretty steep decline for years.
#Glimpses soviet ghost town norwegian isle series
Pyramiden would go on to outlast the Soviet Union, finally shuttering its doors over a series of months in 1998. Eventually, Trust Arktikugol, a Russian state-owned coal company, took ownership of both Pyramiden and Barentsburg. The presence of Russian settlements stems from the fact that the Svalbard Treaty granted signatories - including Russia - rights to Svalbard’s natural resources. But two of the archipelago’s most intriguing tourist draws - the mining towns of Barentsburg, which is still functional, and Pyramiden, long since empty - are Russian settlements. Norway has sovereignty over Svalbard, according to the terms of the Svalbard Treaty of 1920. But then, so did almost everything else at this extreme latitude. With several concentric layers of rock diminishing into the cold sky, the pyramid-like mountain looked quite peculiar. “They say we made that, too,” he said, waving a hand up at the distinctive peak that gives this old coal town its name, in a dismissal of the various rumors that surround this place. No such tricks were employed to usher out its residents. Not so, said Sergei, who offered a less sinister explanation: The town was deserted - mainly for economic reasons - in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Sergei shook his head before I’d even finished my question. According to the rumor, it had been abandoned ever since, frozen in time at the top of the world. I’d heard that in 1998 the Russian government had tricked the town’s 1,000 residents into taking a holiday on the mainland, only to close the mine and forbid them from returning. We were standing at the rudimentary dock in Pyramiden, a ghost town on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the High Arctic. Sergei Chernikov, my guide, had a bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder - in case we came across any polar bears, he said, or in case they came across us.
0 kommentar(er)
