Vorkuta itself

It seems that I walked around the city itself less than around the settlements and beyond. I wonder if I will be able to visit Vorkuta again?

Overall, Vorkuta seemed to me to be a typical provincial Russian city. The only thing that caught the eye were abandoned institutions and a small number of trees. Despite its location, Vorkuta has several parks planted with trees. And even in the snowy autumn it was pleasant to walk through them.

City park with a pond on film. Trees in the tundra do not grow tall.

Many people grow flowers and plants on windowsills (obvious reasons).

Vorkuta seems like one big bedroom community or сommuter town:

Below are four photographs of Vorkuta taken on film:

One day we visited an abandoned medical college. This is all that remains of the former interior:

To be fair, the college moved to another, more compact building. But, like the Vorgashor cultural centre, it was more shabby and unattractive.

Vorkuta appeared to me not as a city stuck in the 90s, but as a plucked flower and doomed to inevitable withering. I got the impression that local ​​government don’t really want to support life there.

The photo shows an abandoned building, which was recently used for cultural activities, and the next photo shows that someone was teaching in this room. Further on in this photo you can see the mine carts of the still-functioning Mining Collage, and the next photo shows the new building of the “Magnit” supermarket.

It seemed to me that I was looking at a visual novel, but all chapters of the novel could be read at the same time. Somewhere a coal mine was smoking and children were playing, and somewhere entire streets stood lifeless. Every abandoned and empty building was like a ghost. It was like a visual form that remained and is now gradually disappearing. Bare stone and concrete – that is what a building is born from, and that is what it ends with. Cities are born, live and die.