Nestled icily in the midst of Svalbard, a cluster of Arctic islands strung along the 79th parallel, the Soviet city of Pyramiden is one of the northernmost settlements in the world.
For centuries, the archipelago was a lawless land visited only by whalers and explorers. Then, in 1920, the Spitsbergen Treaty placed Svalbard under the sovereign rule of Norway, with commercial rights reserved for its other signatories. Although Russia lost its bid for the islands amid the civil unrest that followed World War I, its successor, the Soviet Union, was the only nation to take Norway up on an offer to exploit the land for economic gain.
In the 1930s, Soviet state-run Trust Arktikugol invested in Svalbard’s coal mining operations, and Pyramiden truly began to thrive after World War II.
A posting at Pyramiden may seem like a punishment to the uninitiated, but it was one of the most coveted jobs on offer in the Soviet Union. As the sole settlement in the West, Pyramiden was communism’s show pony, on display for the world. As such, the Soviets made the city a perfect paradigm for its hammer-and-sickle ideology, with an exceptionally high standard of living. Only the best technicians and workers were recruited to the Arctic colony.
After decades of prosperity, Pyramiden declined, largely because of three factors. The first was the limited supply of minable coal; lodes weren’t as plentiful as expected, and drilling for deeper reserves proved costly. Many historians believe that the coal was never a profitable endeavor and that the colony’s true raison d’être was to maintain a foot in the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia, which inherited Pyramiden, could no longer tuck its economic difficulties behind the Iron Curtain. Mainland support needed to keep Pyramiden afloat dwindled.
The coup de grace occurred in 1996, when a charter flight from Moscow that was carrying 141 workers and their families (about 10 percent of the city’s population) crashed on descent, killing everyone on board. The community never recovered. The decision was made not to excavate a deeper layer of coal, and the last lode was mined as winter broke in 1998.
No one has lived in Pyramiden since. Below, take a tour of the enigmatic lost town.
For trips to the lost city of Pyramiden, start in Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main commercial center, located further down the island’s main fjord. Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA offers direct flights three times weekly from Oslo to Longyearbyen. From there, it’s a three-hour boat journey (all easily completed as a day trip) during the warmer months, when the perpetual darkness of winter has lifted and the bays are clear of packed ice—usually May to October, but trips in 2017 started as early as March. Access by Ski-Doo is also possible, but sub-glacial ice floes make this a more treacherous journey.