Pyramiden
Interesting facts
- The town takes its name from the pyramid-shaped mountain that rises directly behind it; in Russian it is simply Piramida.
- The Palace of Culture still holds a Soviet-made Red October grand piano, often described as the northernmost grand piano in the world.
- Because the Arctic ground supports little vegetation, soil was reportedly shipped in from Ukraine to grow a lawn in the town centre.
- The town ran its own cowshed and greenhouses, where heat from the coal-fired power plant was used to grow cucumbers and tomatoes.
- Large letters above the abandoned mine still carry the Soviet slogan Peace to the World, written in Russian.
- The main avenue was named after the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, and the town's Lenin bust looks out towards the Nordenskiöld Glacier.
- In 1996 a charter flight carrying Arktikugol miners and their families crashed on approach to Svalbard Airport, killing all 141 people on board.
- On 27 August 2019 Pyramiden hosted what was billed as the world's northernmost film festival, marking a century of Soviet cinema.
- In 2012 a musician and tour guide became the first person to move back to Pyramiden to live, styling himself the world's northernmost head-banger.
Why it is worth it
At the head of Billefjorden, an Arctic fjord in the heart of Spitsbergen, stands a complete Soviet town that was simply switched off in 1998: brick apartment blocks, a sports hall, a cultural palace, and the northernmost monument to Vladimir Lenin in the world. Pyramiden is a time capsule of the Soviet Arctic, preserved by cold and isolation.
The settlement was founded by Sweden in 1910 for coal mining on Spitsbergen and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927; since then it has belonged to the state mining company Arktikugol. At its height in the 1950s it had about 2,500 inhabitants. Between 1955 and 1998 some nine million tonnes of coal were taken from its mines. The town provided a theatre and library in its cultural centre, a sports complex with what was then the northernmost swimming pool in the world, a school and a canteen that ran around the clock.
Mining ended on 31 March 1998, and the last residents left that October. For almost a decade the town stood empty, its buildings left as they were. The hotel was restored in the 2010s, and today a small summer crew of some 20 to 30 people, mostly working in tourism, lives in a settlement built for thousands; only a handful remain through the winter. Two buildings are in use again — a hotel with a restaurant and a dormitory — while the rest of the town, from the cultural centre to the empty apartment blocks, stands as it was left at the end of the Soviet mining era.
Getting there
Pyramiden lies on Billefjorden on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, about 50 km from Longyearbyen. There is no road connection: the town is reached by boat in summer or by snowmobile in winter. Svalbard Airport, Longyear (LYR), near Longyearbyen, is the nearest airport, about 50 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Pyramiden is an abandoned Soviet coal mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard which has become a tourist destination. Founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden was closed in 1998 and has since remained largely abandoned with most of its infrastructure and buildings still in place, the cold climate preserving much of the infrastructure left behind.
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