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Video: Caucasian Pripyat Akarmara: How a paradise village turned into a ghost town in a year
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Caucasian Pripyat, a ghost town - whatever they call this strange place, located in the subtropics of Abkhazia. Here, just like in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, trees sprout through the windows and roofs, and in the apartments old things are slowly decaying, abandoned by the owners in a great hurry and with the unfulfilled hope of a speedy return. Feral piglets, cows and sad dogs roam the streets. So what happened here? The fate of Akarmara is very sad and instructive …
Paradise city in European style
After the Great Patriotic War, this town (or rather, the village that was part of the city of Tkuarchal, formerly Tkvarcheli) was created by the forces of captured German architects and builders, and that is why it turned out to be monumental and beautiful in a European way. Many buildings are built in the neoclassical style. They say that some Germans even stayed here.
Very soon, in addition to residential buildings, a school, a hospital, a market, a house of culture and even a sanatorium appeared here. The village of Akarmara, located in a picturesque, in fact, resort area, was considered elite, and it was very prestigious to get an apartment in it.
Some 30-40 years ago, life was in full swing in Akarmar. Cozy streets were filled with people, music, lively voices of Caucasian housewives and children's laughter could be heard from the windows. In the 1980s, several thousand townspeople lived here - mainly the families of miners who worked in the Tkvarcheli coal deposits.
They thought they'd be back soon
Alas, the paradise life of the village was disturbed by the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict in the early 1990s. The city of Tkuarchal was shelled for over a year.
Civilians were forced to leave their homes and flee. They settled in safer corners of the country - seemingly for a while. However, the civil war dragged on, and when peace reigned in Akarmar, no one wanted to return back to the city, which had been damaged by shells and fell into desolation.
In the abandoned apartments of residential buildings, there are books, clothes, children's toys, covered with a thick layer of dust. For almost 30 years now, laundry has been drying on balconies that no one will ever take off. Buildings are slowly but surely covered with lush vegetation - just like in any "city of the dead".
There are still a couple of dozen residents left in Akarmar (these are literally several families), and this makes it quite creepy. Lonely figures against the background of dilapidated houses look like ghosts. Deprived of connection with "civilization", they themselves equip their life - as they can.
And if in recent years Tkuarchal himself began to gradually revive (coal mining continues there), then the Akarmara village remained a "abandoned place", which visiting photographers and connoisseurs of the romance of empty cities and buildings love to visit.
Once these places could be called a health resort, because nearby are the healing springs of the Tkvarcheli mineral water and sulphurous springs (known in tsarist times as "Abaran waters"). In the last century, vacationers from all over the country came here for treatment to take radon baths. In recent years, by order of the authorities, they began to restore the radon baths, but Akarmara herself was not affected by the restoration.
The city is very reminiscent of Chernobyl - except that the architecture is luxurious and the nature is more picturesque - after all, the subtropics.
The most annoying and sad thing is that in such a beautiful and fertile corner of the planet, unlike Chernobyl, there is no radiation and one could live in peace. Educational institutions, shops, sanatoriums could work here, and cheerful children who came to their grandmothers to relax for the summer could play in the courtyards. Only now, no one has either the means or the desire to restore the village.
So Akarmara remains a sad ghost town among paradise nature - as living evidence of the absurdity and unreasonableness of human actions.
For various reasons still empty 30 landmark cities scattered around the world.… Each of them has its own sad fate.
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