![]() ![]() ![]() The 300-seat cinema almost looks as if it were used yesterday, as does the basketball court, still clearly outlined. Giving a glimpse of life as it typically was in the Soviet Union is a bust of Lenin placed outside the sports and cultural centre.īlack-and-white photos of football and hockey matches and chess tournaments hang in the entrance hall, taking visitors back in time. Some 1,200 Russians then lived in Pyramiden, which boasted several four-storey buildings, a hospital, schools, a football ground, and even a farm with cows and chickens. Sasha, working his fourth season here hundreds of kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, says the residents thrived in the 70s and 80s before the USSR began to unravel. The rails used by the funicular to ferry miners up to the entrance on the mountain face, and by trailers to haul the coal down, are still visible, while the wharf remains littered with ageing piles of bricks, gravel and rusted metal parts. so mining really began in earnest in 1956," in the Cold War years when Nikita Khrushchev ran the Soviet empire, he added. "The first settlers came in 1936 but were evacuated by British forces at the beginning of the Second World War. The Soviets bought the then-small coalmine in 1927 from Swedes, says the guardian whose hammer-and-sickle engraved chapka smacks of the now defunct Communist-era USSR. "We haven't seen one since May but you never know," says the 33-year-old. Why is he armed? In case of polar bears, until recently the town's only inhabitants, he tells the group. "The Svalbard is Norwegian but had a special status enabling other people to live or work there," tour guide Kristin Jaeger-Wexsahl tells the group of several dozen who sailed from the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, some 50 kilometres away.īut as they step off to visit the former coal centre named after a pyramid-shaped mountain in the background, Sasha takes over. (PYRAMIDEN, Norway) - A man in a chapka hat and black coat, rifle slung over a shoulder, idles on the pontoon as a group of tourists sail in to visit Arctic oddity, Pyramiden, a Soviet-era ghost town.Īlexander Romanovskiy, better known as Sasha, is the guardian of the mining town abandoned in 1998 but still owned by a Russian firm, Arktikugol, though it is located on a fjord on Norway's Spitzberg island in the heart of the Svalbard - islands halfway between continental Norway and the North Pole. ![]()
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