Pyramiden

Pyramiden is a Village in Pyramiden, Svalbard and Jan Mayen

Pyramiden is a ghost town frozen in time. This abandoned Russian coal-mining settlement stands on the island of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, high in the Arctic Ocean far north of mainland Norway. Sweden founded it and sold it to the Soviet Union in 1927. It grew into a model mining town of several hundred people, with apartment blocks, a cultural centre, a swimming pool, a greenhouse, and the world’s northernmost statue of Lenin, all set beneath the pyramid-shaped mountain that gives the place its name. Then, almost overnight in 1998, the mine closed and the town emptied. Its buildings have stood ever since, preserved by the cold, dry Arctic air. Today Pyramiden is a hauntingly well-kept ruin, reached by boat or snowmobile from Longyearbyen and visited on guided tours, with a single hotel reopened for the few who make the trip. At around 78°N it is among the most northerly settlements on Earth, deep inside the auroral zone. Through the polar night, when the sun does not rise for months, the skies are utterly dark, and with no competing light for many kilometres the northern lights wheel with rare clarity above the silent ruins and the glaciers beyond.