Aniva Lighthouse
Interesting facts
- A lighthouse at Cape Aniva was first proposed in 1898 after a steamship sank nearby, but the rock was judged too hard to reach and the plan was dropped.
- Under Japanese rule it was called the Nakashiretoko Cape Lighthouse, after the Japanese name of the cape, and kept that name until 1946.
- Construction took a little over two years, from June 1937 to October 1939, and cost about 600,000 yen.
- The 270-kilogram weight that turned the optics hung inside a shaft running through the centre of the tower and had to be wound up every three hours.
- Each floor had its job: diesel and battery rooms at the bottom, kitchen and food store above, then the radio room, and keepers' quarters on the third to fifth floors.
- It was rated a third-class light, with a lens one metre across and a 500-millimetre focal length, and it also carried a nautophone fog signal.
- In 1968 the tower's third floor had to be reinforced with concrete blocks against the battering of wind and sea.
- When the nuclear battery failed in 2006 it was not replaced, because satellite navigation had made the light less essential to shipping.
- The rock it stands on, Sivuchya, takes its name from the Russian word for the Steller sea lion.
- A lighthouse featured in the video game Escape from Tarkov is modelled on Aniva, and the painter Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov made it the subject of a canvas.
Why it is worth it
Aniva Lighthouse stands on Sivuchya, a lone rock off Cape Aniva, the south-eastern tip of Sakhalin, where Aniva Bay opens toward the La Pérouse Strait and the cold North Pacific. It is one of the most haunting buildings on any coast: a round concrete tower banded in white and black, rising from a broad base that clings to the rock, with nothing around it but surf, hidden reefs and the bare cliffs of the cape. Fog is frequent here and the currents are treacherous, and in that light the tower looks less like a working beacon than a ruined castle at sea.
It was built between 1937 and 1939, when the south of Sakhalin was Japanese territory, under the direction of the engineer Shinobu Miura, and its design reflects the difficulty of the site. The tower, about 31 metres tall on an oval base, rises through nine floors and carried living space for a crew of up to a dozen keepers isolated on the rock. The lamp stood about 40 metres above the sea and could be seen for some 15 nautical miles; its Fresnel optics were turned by a clockwork driven by a falling weight of 270 kilograms.
After the Second World War the south of Sakhalin passed to the Soviet Union, and the light continued to serve the strait. In 1990 it was automated with a strontium-90 radioisotope generator, one of more than a hundred Soviet lighthouses powered this way. The generators were removed in 2005–2006, the light went out, and the building has been left to wind and water ever since. Its peeling paint, rust-streaked concrete and empty rooms have made it a magnet for photographers and adventurous travellers, and the silhouette is now one of the best-known images of Sakhalin.
Getting there
The lighthouse lies off Cape Aniva, at the south-eastern tip of Sakhalin, about 84 km from Korsakov in a straight line and about 110 km from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk International Airport (UUS). There is no road to it: travellers drive the long, rough route to the nearest settlement and then continue by boat for about two hours, and the landing depends on the sea. Most visitors go with an organised trip from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk or Korsakov.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Aniva Lighthouse also known as Nakashiretoko is located on the South East of Sakhalin island, in the North Pacific Ocean. It is located on a difficult to access rock off the tip of Cape Aniva at the entrance of Aniva Bay, on the eastern entrance to the La Pérouse Strait.
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