SVALBARD


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PREVIOUS PAGES: Original Soviet mineshaft in Pyramiden CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: View from the top of Yggdrasilkampen; Soviet-era air traffic control centre, Pyramiden; bust of Lenin gazes across Pyramiden to the glacier beyond


he ‘governor’ is a man of few words but many jobs. Sitting opposite me in his permanently oil-stained orange overalls, he looks past me out of a window in the Pyramiden Hotel


at the empty buildings outside. He has the look of a concerned parent. Out there, on the decaying streets of Pyramiden, Petr Petrovich is caretaker, driver, gardener, janitor and, unofficially, governor. At the hotel (the only inhabitable building in town), he’s the de facto manager. “Sometimes the tourists ask us to make it warmer in here,” he says through my guide and translator, Sergey Chernikov, “and sometimes they ask about phone connection.” The lack of phone signal and internet only


underlines the sense of it being a place that exists in a very different era. This former mining town on the Svalbard archipelago in the High Arctic has become a strange tourist draw at the very edge of humanity. Founded in 1910 by Sweden, it was bought by the USSR in 1927, although large-scale coal extraction didn’t begin here until 1940, aſter which it continued until the settlement was abandoned in 1998. Today, this remote corner of Svalbard — now part of Norway — marks the starting point for a series of treks in summer and the end point for winter snowmobile trips. At all times of the year, it


has an otherworldliness to it; a frozen Soviet time capsule that is, by turns, photogenic and ugly, eerie and endearing. When the mine and settlement was


shut down in 1998, the townspeople all lost their livelihoods and homes. Pyramiden lay empty for around a decade before the Russian government started to send people — including Ukrainians like Petr — back north, not to repopulate the settlement, nor to restart the mine, but to develop what’s leſt of the town as a destination for a niche type of tourism. The town’s name comes from the


3,074ſt mountain that looms over it like a sentinel. It looks almost man-made: eight concentric layers of rock, appearing like huge sculpture or, indeed, a pyramid. This remarkable piece of geology starts sunny days tinged a pale gold and finishes them blood orange. Many visitors who come to Pyramiden don’t see these colour fluctuations, partly because the majority don’t stay overnight, and partly because, at almost 79 degrees north, the sun doesn’t breach the horizon at all for three months in winter. Conversely, for three months of summer it doesn’t drop below it. However, the main reason most visitors don’t get to see the pyramid peak in sunlight is quite simply because its oſten hidden from view by the volatile weather. The temperature hovers around freezing most days during my summer stay but there’s


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