Almost abandoned Russian city – Sinegorye near Magadan Russia

This town in the Magadan region of Russia is called “Sinegorye” or “Blue Mountains”. A very nice name for a town, but in reality this is an almost completely abandoned place, and is now the size of a village. Its population has fallen by 70% since the collapse of the USSR and so almost 3/4 of its buildings remain empty and abandoned, including many huge apartment complexes like the one in the a picture above. Sergey, the awesome Russian blogger we so like to post here, has visited this place and says it’s very easy to say which buildings are abandoned – in the abandoned buildings all of the window glass is broken.

Sergey says that there is a strange tradition in most semi abandoned places like this – as soon as one window gets broken, shortly after all the rest of the windows shed their glass as well. This is all done mostly by local youths – as soon as they see the destruction of windows has started by someone they all join and finish it fast.

This is the town’s downtown. Here you can see the city central square and monument and buildings here are still intact.

However the main street on both sides of the main square has only empty, abandoned buildings and kids wandering around.

The main street continues.

This city used to have over 10,000 people living here. Now just of fraction of them remain.

More and more empty houses.

Some buildings have only one or two apartments occupied, the rest are abandoned with open doors and windows.

Still you can see passers-by on the streets, including young women.

Some people try to paint parts of the buildings they occupy in bright colors.

Like here, too.

A mother with kids on the streets.

Kids never see nice cars here so they wanted to take a picture.

All of the apartments in this building have been abandoned but there is a shop on the ground floor.

And here is inside of this shop – lots of very different beverages.

And some coffee.

Also sweets.

And even some produce.

Also of course lots of canned foods and pastas – the most durable foods you can preserve for years.

Some sausages. The prices, Sergey says, are higher than in Moscow which itself is a very expensive Russian city. The logistics costs here are crazy.

However to a Western eye the prices are probably rather reasonable – Cola bottle is roughly $1.50, since in general food prices in Russia are much cheaper than abroad.

Hope you liked the story and big thanks to Sergei! His website is below:

via