Grytviken

Grytviken is found on the Island of South Georgia, a British island in the South Atlantic. The name derives from the Swedish for "The Pot Cove" by a Swedish surveyor. The small town of Grytviken was founded in November 1904 by a Norwegian Captain, working on behalf of an Argentinian company. The town was created as a whaling station and at its height 300 people lived and worked there.

The Norwegian Captain who founded Grytviken, called Captain Carl Anton Larsen actually became a British citizen by living on the island, in fact he sent a message to the British government saying: "I have given up my Norwegian citizens rights and have resided here since I started whaling in this colony on the 16 November 1904 and have no reason to be of any other citizenship than British, as I have had and intend to have my residence here still for a long time."

Grytviken flourished because the whaling season proved lucrative with many whales caught, but is most well known for being the resting place of the intrepid explorer Shakleton who died at sea close to South Georgia in 1922 and was buried there.

The town was deserted in 1966 when the whaling station was closed because of a decline in whales caught. The only time since 1966 that there has been anyone living at Grytviken was at the outset of the Falklands war when the Argentinians landed and took control of the area. This was a shortlived use of the town.

The church in Grytviken is still used from time to time by people on the island for services but other than this it is a ghost town with no one living there and only seen time to time by tourists passing by in cruise ships.

Image courtesy of Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

Pyramiden

Pyramiden is a deserted town found in a cluster of Islands called the Svalbard. The towns on islands were founded by the Swedish in 1910 but were sold to the former Soviet Union (now Russia) in 1927.

The Soviet Union called Pyramiden, Pyramida (Пирамида) and created a coal mining settlement on the island. At its height the coal mining settlement had over one thousand inhabitants making it a thriving community build on the mining work in the area.

The town was vibrant up until 1998 when the town became deserted after the Russian state run company Arctikugol Trust closed the mines on January 10th 1998. when this happened the people of Pyramiden vacated the area in a hurry leaving everything as it was, including alot of belongings and tools.

Pyramiden is now a tourist destination catering to the English, Russian and Norwegian languages. Although there is no restriction on visiting Pyramiden no one is allowed in the buildings due to health and safety reasons.


Images attributed to Eckhard Pecher.

Oradour-sur-Glane

Oradour-sur-Glane was once a proud village located in the Limousin region of central western France with a population in excess of seven hundred inhabitants, that was until the 2nd World War.

On the 10th June 1944 the German Waffen-SS murdered six hundred and forty two of the villagers.

The Germans took the women and children to the church where they set it on fire. Anyone who tried to escape the inferno was gunned down by machine guns so only one woman was able to escape by hiding in a bush overnight.

The men were all rounded up in barns and shot in the legs and left until all were not moving, the bodies were covered in straw and set on fire.

After the war a new village was built close by to house those that were left after this massacre, the orignial village of Oradour-sur-Glane still stands in its 2nd World War condition as a memorial to all those that lost their lives on the 10th June 1944.

Image attributed to Two wings under licence (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Agdam

Once a proud city of over one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and the capital of the Agdam Rayon area of Azerbaijan. This once beautiful city became a ghost town in 1993 after the tensely fought war between Azerbaijan and Armenia for the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

In 1993 Armenian forces moved into the city taking seige then vandalising and trashing the properties of the city driving the people who lived there out. Since this time the city has lay empty as the Armenian government still lay claim to the area and have full control of it through military might.

Since the Azerbaijani people left the city has been desolate and decayed over time, the Armenians have done nothing with the land they have taken control of.

Centralia

Centralia is a borough in Pennsylvania that once had a thriving population of over one thousand but today is lucky to have even nine today.

Centralia suffered a fate that's still evident to those that travel to the borough today. The story goes that in the 1960's the local government paid five volunteers of the volunteer fire department to clean up a landfill that was located in an abandoned mine. Usually this was done yearly by setting the landfill on fire then extinguishing it as all the landfill had burned but on one occasion the story says that they did not extinguish the fire.

Over time the fire travelled through the depths of fire and into the empty coal mine below. As coal is very flammable the fire kept burning throughout the 1960's and 1970's. The full scale of the problem was not evident to the locals living in the area until the late 1970's when the local gas owner used a thermometer to check the temperature of the gas and found it to be nearly 80 degrees centigrade.

By 1984 the government had given forty two million dollars to use to buyout locals and relocate them elsewhere, by 1992 the local government condemned all buildings in Centralia.

The fire still rages under the earth over a 1.6km square area and will do so for at least another 250 years as there is no plan to stop it. Today only nine people remain.

Kayakoy

Kayaköy is found in south western Turkey not far from the city of Fethiye. The town was inhabited until 1923 by Anatolian Greeks and had been since at least the early 1700's when it was built on top of the ancient city of Carmylessus.

At its height in 1900 Kayakoy had a population of over two thousand residents, nearly all of which were Christian Greeks so what happened to this wonderful town?

A Greco-Turkish war happened between 1919 and 1922 that saw much bloodshed between Greece and Turkey. At the end of the war the two countries completed a population exchange that saw the Greeks of Kayakoy sent back to Greece leaving the town desolate.

Today there are over three thousand five hundred preserved buildings and ruins, most of these are houses but there are two Greek Christian Orthodox churches within the town.

UNESCO has declared Kayakoy as a World Friendship and Peace Village.

Image attributed to Orderinchaos

Kolmanskop

Located near the port of Lüderitz in the south of Namibia Kolmanskop is a ghost town on the fridges of the desert that has been empty for over sixty years.

Komanskop was built as a small mining town after diamonds were discovered in the area around 1908 in the guise of a German town, complete with its own hospital, power station and amenities such as skittle alleys and cinemas.

Unfortunately after World War I the world entered the "Great depression" causing the price of diamonds to crash dramatically alot of the diamond mining was moved elswhere and people left for these other mining areas.

It was not until 1956 how ever that the town was fully abandoned and has been empty ever since. Nowadays the houses of the town are knee deep in sand inside because of the forces of the desert.

Image attributed to Harald Süpfle