Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Ağdam

  39° 59′ 35″ N, 46° 55′ 50″ E

  Ağdam is the world’s largest dead city. It is a place of ruins. Around the central mosque, one of the few buildings still with a roof, stretches a scene of destruction. If you peer down on Ağdam from Google Earth, you would be forgiven for thinking that a nuclear bomb had just exploded.

  Ağdam was a casualty of a war over the nearby ethnic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh (Karabakh for short), between Azerbaijan and Armenia and their ethnic allies, and was deserted then systematically blown apart in 1993. Between 1992 and 1994 many thousands died across this region in brutal ethnic battles while the rest of the world was still celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union. Karabakh saw some of the worst bloodshed. From the start, war reports were being filed of the scalping, beheading, and mutilation of civilians, including children. Along with the dead, three million were displaced, among them all of those who once called Ağdam home.

  The attempt to destroy places entirely is a characteristic of modern, total warfare, in which the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight is assumed to follow from the annihilation of its centers of civilization and civilian life. The level of bombardment is a perverse tribute to the primary role of place in human identity. Typically, only the center of town is destroyed, and is quickly rebuilt after the war’s end. The complete nature and the longevity of Ağdam’s ruination make it distinctive, as well as the fact that it was so recent. A few decades ago Ağdam was a busy regional capital, known for its lively bazaar and for its quaint bread museum. Although a predominantly Muslim city, it was also renowned for its wineries. The Ağdam Brandy Company was rooted in a century-long tradition. Today one of the city’s many ghosts is a brand of fortified wine, still drunk in some of the former Soviet states, known as Ağdam. It’s the kind of potent and cheap brew that Russians call a “mumble juice.”

  Ağdam doesn’t get many visitors. The accounts of the few travelers who have made it past the minefields describe an apocalyptic landscape. Here are brief extracts of two such tales from travel bloggers, the first from Justin Ames, the second from Paul Bradbury:

  One thing that captures your attention before long is the scale of the destruction. Every time you think you are near the edge of the city or the end of a road, you go over another hill or around a bend and a whole new field of destruction opens up in front of you.

  In this former town of 50,000 people we saw fifteen civilians (a mother and two sons were picking berries, which were growing wild in the main street; an elderly couple with granddaughter were foraging for firewood; the others were collecting scrap metal) . . . On one broken gate I saw the number 50. House number fifty, but which street? No other identification was evident. Even the roads had been dug up and all the pipes removed.

  What is most telling about these accounts is their tone of surprise. “I had never even heard of Ağdam,” they chorus. How many of us could say otherwise? Or where in the world Karabakh might be? As the ragged fringes of the former USSR have been transformed into a shifting delta of enmities, the outside world has come down with shock-induced geoamnesia. In North America or Western Europe the region’s place names, unpronounceable, unplaceable, fly up every so often out of the news but are instantly forgotten. For anyone over a certain age it is hard to believe that we utterly mistook something so big, so solid, as the USSR. Even at a distance of almost a quarter of a century it is difficult to grasp that it was never a country at all but an unwieldy empire.

  Ağdam is an endless source of surprise, not least because it keeps on getting forgotten. For the Armenians and Azeris, the ethnic majority in Azerbaijan, by contrast, it is an ever-potent reminder of what both sides like to cast as an age-old territorial dispute between victim and aggressor. The fiercely Christian Armenians have good reasons to think they are surrounded by enemies. Azerbaijan, to their east, is a Turkic state and stalwart ally of Turkey, its western neighbor and a country that not only denies responsibility for the Armenian genocide of 1915 but prosecutes people who talk about it in public, under a law that forbids “insults” against the Turkish nation. But Turkic peoples across the region have their own history of persecution and genocide. They have been the victims of countless ethnic massacres, including in Karabakh.

  When the Bolsheviks finally took control of this warring region in the early 1920s, they began to make deals to win over the biggest national groups. They first promised Karabakh to the Armenians, but then, in order to win over Turkey, gave it to Azerbaijan. Simmering disputes were not so much resolved as crushed. These conflicts became increasingly public in the late 1980s when protests throughout Karabakh called for an end to Azerbaijani control. The Kremlin refused to countenance any change in the status quo, but when the USSR fell apart, so did the brakes on ethnic conflict.

  Ağdam was singled out for special treatment in these disputes because of its strategic location near Karabakh. But it was also targeted because it provided the backdrop for street protests against the breakaway of Karabakh in the late 1980s. In 1988 street fighting erupted between ethnic Azeris and Armenians in and around Ağdam. The town became a symbol of Azeri militancy and resistance. It was the memory of this that seems to have spurred the pro-Armenian Karabakh army to such vindictive destruction a few years later. Certainly, the Karabakh army’s explanation was weak; it claimed that Ağdam was being used as a military base. Yet the city was poorly defended and soon fell, its population fleeing before the invading troops. The invaders then withdrew and subjected the empty city to continuous artillery bombardment until almost every building was destroyed. Other regional towns were also attacked, but the assault on Ağdam, because of its size and thoroughness, remains remarkable. Today the war is in abeyance, but there are few signs that the conflict is over.

  The Armenians know very well that most atrocities get forgotten. Karabakh declared its independence after its military success, and although it is not recognized by any other country, even by its kin nation of Armenia, it is a de facto sovereign state. The Karabakhians’ position is that they will hold on to Ağdam, and the rest of what they call their “security belt,” until their independence is recognized by Azerbaijan. But recognition is a distant prospect, and in the meantime, all that the Azeris have to hold on to is a different label not only for the “security belt” but for the whole of Karabakh: it’s “Armenian-occupied Azerbaijan.”

  The legal claims are far apart while the ruined city crumbles away. In the interregnum before the next wave of violence, small steps to rehabilitation have been made, and in 2010 the Karabakh government announced that the central mosque had been partially restored. However, the propaganda mileage that can be gained from restoring one building in the middle of a wrecked city is small. And even this gesture has elicited bitter recrimination. The media in Karabakh has reported vox-pop reactions such as, “If the Azeris destroyed our cemeteries and churches, why are we restoring their mosques?”

  Both the total nature of the destruction of Ağdam and the long time it has remained deserted have established it as an iconic site of suffering and anger. The grief is compounded by the inability or unwillingness of the outside world to notice Ağdam’s, or Karabakh’s, calamity. The only real rebuilding of Ağdam that has taken place has been symbolic, among supporters of the Ağdam soccer team. Imaret Stadium, built in 1952, was home to FK Qarabagh Ağdam, but the building was destroyed along with the rest of the city and the team scattered. The team has since become a cultural symbol to the region’s Azeri refugees, and with financial aid from both Turks and other Azeris the club was reborn and now plays in the Azerbaijan Premier League. It is one of the most successful clubs in the country and has made it through to European-level competition several times. A new “home ground” in Azerbaijan has been found for it. Its success contrasts with the fortunes of what was once one of the USSR’s top clubs, FK Karabakh Stepanakert, which is based in the Karabakh capital. Banned from the international game, that team has withered, and today it has no money
and only local fans to rely on. It sounds like a parable: the ghost town cheered to the rooftops and the decline of the crowing victor. But success at soccer is thin consolation for the loss of a city. The annihilation of place has consequences for both its victims and its perpetrators, and until it is rebuilt the dead city of Ağdam will continue to excite further hatred and violence.

  Pripyat

  51° 24′ 20″ N, 30° 03′ 25″ E

  The flip side of urbanization is the fantasy that one day nature will return and the hostile concrete of the city will be carpeted with flowers. But as our capacity to poison the earth has grown, so this dreamscape has turned sick. While it’s true that nature has returned to reclaim the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, this is mostly explained by the fact that radiation levels there are so high that all the humans have had to be evacuated.

  Less than three kilometers away from Pripyat is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Late one day in April 1986 the residents of Pripyat heard the following announcement from their local radio station: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Aid will be given to those affected and a committee of government inquiry has been set up.” Later the same day the entire population of forty-five thousand was bundled into over a thousand buses, without any time to pack. Clothes were left in wardrobes, toys remained in empty prams, pets were abandoned. People were told they would be away for just three days, but they never came back. Even the local army unit’s tanks and helicopters were left where they stood. As we now know, they should have, and could have, gotten out sooner. Reactor No. 4 had exploded three days earlier but the accident was kept secret, leaving the city subject to lethal levels of radioactivity that would have devastating consequences for many of those who lived there, as well as for subsequent generations.

  After 1992 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, on-site security lapsed and Pripyat became prey to looters, who even stripped out all the wiring and linoleum. But while human life abandoned the city, over the coming years nature surged back. Today the roads and buildings have been cracked open by the roots of young trees. Mosses and grasses cover the asphalt and decaying concrete, and as the city’s drainage system clogged, after each spring thaw paved areas become shallow lakes. An amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel, due to open on May 1, 1986, stills stands, turning to rust amid the weeds.

  An old dream has come back to mock us. In 1890 William Morris wrote News from Nowhere, in which he delighted in a vision of the city drawn back into nature. He prophesied Londoners turning against the ugly streets and creating “a very jolly place, now that the trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in 1955.” It was a powerful idea and tapped into a growing sense of urban malaise. As the world has been covered in increasingly large urban conglomerations, the desire to see nature take its revenge has become ever more thrilling and dangerous. But Morris, the anti-industrial prophet, could not have imagined that nature’s revenge would look like this. It is estimated that Pripyat will be safe again for human habitation in about nine hundred years. Radiation levels are so high that even the briefest of visits is ill advised, and the exclusion zone around the site, officially known as the Zone of Alienation, covers 2,600 kilometers, which is bigger than Luxembourg. The most dangerous places are inside the buildings, where contaminated dust and debris have settled. Jill Dougherty, an American journalist based in Moscow, recalls a drive around Pripyat: “It is completely quiet—it is the most eerie experience I have encountered.” She goes on to describe pavements that “have been taken over by moss and brushwood” and “houses literally rotting . . . I could hear the sound of dripping water coming through the ceilings.”

  When it was first built, Pripyat was a model Soviet town. Building began on February 4, 1970, and “shock construction” rapidly created a home for numerous Soviet nationalities. The street names—Enthusiasts, Friendship of the Peoples—reflected Pripyat’s diversity. It was a bright city of wide streets and modern apartment blocks, many decorated with ceramic tiles. The average age of the residents was only twenty-six, and more than one thousand babies were born every year. One former local recalls with pride, “Only in this city could you see a parade of children’s strollers, when in the evening, mothers and fathers walked the streets with their babies.”

  For a while it looked as if nothing would survive the world’s worst nuclear accident. In the immediate aftermath of the blast everything was affected, often in odd and gruesome ways. Animal embryos dissolved, and the thyroid glands of horses literally fell apart. One large area of pine woods in the path of the fallout became known as the Red Forest as the trees changed color and died. Today, though, the forest is green again. Many plants adapted rapidly to the new environment. A comparative study of two plantings of soybeans, one sowed five kilometers from the reactor and one sowed one hundred kilometers away, has found that the former were highly contaminated and weighed half as much as they should but also that they were undergoing molecular adaptation. For example, they had three times as much of an enzyme (called cysteine synthase) that protects plants against environmental stress as normal plants.

  Meanwhile, the city and its surrounding exclusion zone have been colonized by a variety of animals. Radioecologist Sergey Gaschak has observed that “a lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” the concrete shell that was built over the blown reactor in 1986. At the epicenter of the disaster he has spotted “starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart—I saw nests, and I found eggs.” A head and species count of fauna in the exclusion zone in the mid-2000s found 280 species of birds as well as 66 species of mammals, with a total of 7,000 wild boar, 600 wolves, 3,000 deer, 1,500 beavers, 1,200 foxes, 15 lynx, and thousands of elk. Bear footprints have also been spotted. This is something of a revelation in this part of Ukraine, since bears have been unknown here for many years.

  Mary Mycio, whose Wormwood Forest is a widely read natural history of the site, argues, “On the surface radiation is very good for wildlife.” The reason is simple: “it forces people to leave the contaminated area.” Referring to the wider exclusion zone, she claims, “It is a radioactive wilderness and it is thriving.”

  Yet it would be odd if Pripyat and its environs were harmful only to human beings. Another way of looking at the area is as a zone of mutant nature. The flora and fauna may look like they are “thriving,” but that’s only by means of a crude head count in comparison with normal cities. Timothy Mousseau, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina who has studied the area in depth, conceded to National Geographic News, “One of the great ironies of this particular tragedy is that many animals are doing considerably better than when the humans were there.” But he also warned that “it would be a mistake” to conclude that this means they aren’t suffering. In fact, Mousseau’s research shows that reproductive rates among local birds are much lower than average, and evidence from other studies reveals hormone damage in trees, many of which have been growing in strange and twisted ways. The mutation of the trees’ growth receptors means that, as a colleague of Mousseau, James Morris, explains, they “are having a terrible time knowing which way is up.” Other work has shown even odder reactions, such as freshwater lake worms switching from asexual to sexual reproduction.

  It is hard to know if these changes are signs of damage or adaptations or both, but they tell us that this is no Garden of Eden. When he visited the area in 2005 the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, floated the idea that it could become a nature reserve. Since then the local authorities have been scoping the idea of a Chernobyl National Nature Park. Paradoxically, at the same time the president proposed that the site could be used to store foreign nuclear waste. This idea was soon thrown out, but it drops a heavy clue that Ukraine is trying to find an economic use for the exclusion zone. All the “good news” about abundant flora and fauna is being used to suggest that the area is bouncing back and that lethal radiation and biodiversity are happy be
dfellows.

  The dream of the city returned to nature is a persistent one. The more we urbanize and rid ourselves of nature, the more it haunts us and the more likely we are to take a strange delight in seeing sidewalks and buildings broken apart by tree roots. This is what is happening at Pripyat, but the dream wasn’t meant to be like this. William Morris’s hope was for a balanced relationship between people and nature. In 1890 that could still have happened, and one day, perhaps, it might yet be possible. In the meantime, the overgrown streets of Pripyat symbolize the abandonment of that hope. We were supposed to be part of this story: regaining something, rejoining something we’d lost. Pripyat points to an alternative future.

  The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion

  37° 43′ 37″ N, 15° 11′ 02″ E

  Modern places are made up of layers of incomplete visions of the future, and the result is a permanent state of impermanence. Giarre, a small Sicilian seaside town that lies in the shadow of Mount Etna, offers one of the world’s most startling concentrations of half-finished grand building projects. This town within a town was dubbed the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion by Italian artists, and the name has stuck. Here you will find twenty-five incomplete structures built between the mid-1950s and the 2000s, many of considerable size, such as a vast Athletics and Polo Stadium, an unfinished near-Olympic-size Regional Swimming Pool, and a tumbling concrete palace known as the Multifunctional Hall. Their concrete shells are slowly being taken over by meadow grass and cacti, but they still dominate the landscape.