Pyramiden
A morning walk through a ghost city in the Arctic.
After doing geology thirty days in a row, we were about to finish the German BGR CASE 22 Expedition. We left the northern part of the Svalbard Archipelago early enough to have some extra time, in case we would have had to face an unforeseen problem. But everything went smooth and after rounding Oscar II Land we sailed into a foggy Isjfjorden, prematurely. To do so we had sailed all night long. The effort was paying off in the form of a tourism journey around the Spitzbergen’s central fjord. We were going to Pyramiden!
Our two leaders, Skip and Karsten, had been there in the past, they suggested we could get tight to an existing quay. So after spending the whole month at sea or at anchor, we freed all the docking gear from the forepeak and we prepared Vinson of Antarctica for mooring in the uninhabited wooden wharf. It was wild.
Pyramiden is a mountain, a mine, and an abandoned Soviet experiment. We all on board had read and seen images about it. My friend Guille was there a few years ago, he showed me an splendid footage about those deserted streets and buildings , about the very few people (less than a dozen Russian souls) living there. But I can’t tell why, maybe because the sad grey light of that morning, the place looked more disheartening than what I had imagined.
We stepped down the boat and walked through the road connecting the docks and the empty streets. This village was designed by the soviets as the model of what they thought it was the perfect society. Hundreds of hard men, dragging their sturdy bodies through the tiny and dark corridors inside the mountain, extracting the mineral that would give the energy to their country’s dream. In exchange, them and their families were living in a community with all kind of activities. Comfortable houses with central heating. All sort of sports installations, Olympic swimming pool, theatre, ballet, cinema, sport courts, music and a stunning library. Everything was free, including all the food, even the caviar. They just needed to use money at the pub, in the bar.
Everything failed decades ago. But all seemed like frozen in time and space. We were surrounded by the streets, the deserted buildings, by the walls that witnessed that kind of extinct civilization. We had a Russian lunch at the empty hotel, bursh and local beer! We played football and basketball at the sports courts, we visited the silent theatre hall, we walked through the miners passage from town back to the docks. It was a strange place with a very weird energy. I thought it is one of the ugliest but most thought-provoking places to visit. It is something more than a ghost city.
Kenneth Perdigón Skipper
