Murmansk is a little baby city, only 103 years old, built for industry. That means pretty much everything is functional and built cheaply. There are no decorative survivors of the Imperial era hiding up here. Murmansk is a city for work.
But if you walk half an hour or so uphill away from the port and the station, you’ll find a contrasting bit of beautiful open nature; an area of Arctic sub-tundra surrounding a lake. Yes, sub-tundra isn’t a thing, or at least if it is, this almost certainly isn’t it. What I mean is moss and heather and small birches, the sort of moorland-lite you find in climates like this and Iceland. It’s odd for me to think of Murmansk as anything other than permanently frozen but it was built because the North Atlantic Drift means the port is ice-free. It was hot enough when I was there in early September.
There are two main focal points to this bit of lakeside paradise. The first is the ice-bathers’ hut. In winter, when the lake freezes, people swim in it. To each their own. Finns jump in frozen lakes too but at least they combine it with saunas. In my part of the world, the only water you jump in while it’s snowing is a steaming bath.
Of course, they swim in the summer too. I imagine the lake is still too cold for me even in August but if you live 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle and enjoy open water swimming, summer is the better season to indulge. I saw one person swimming. I saw several people in swimwear sitting on the benches or the ground outside the hut sunbathing.
If I haven’t mentioned it before, and I’m sure I must have done, I took some watercolour postcards, a selection of sketching pens and a tin of Hobbycraft’s best beginners-value watercolour paints with me. I don’t have an artistic bone in my body but I felt like it would be nice to have some hand drawn souvenirs among the postcards and photos and the lake made a great subject for my unskilled pen.
The other focal point is the Alyosha monument, a gigantic stone sculpture of a soldier looking out over the Bay of Kola to commemorate all the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Great Patriotic War, 1941-45. As war memorials go, it’s certainly up there but for me, it was more about the viewpoint. You can see the dirty sprawly city down the hill, see the smoking chimneys and welding sparks in the port but you can also see right down the Bay of Kola, which is actually a fjord.
You see, Murmansk was plonked firmly on what was a pristine bit of Arctic coastline 103 years ago. In between the city and the quarries and the docks and the temporary accommodation for workers, it’s still relatively unspoiled. With your back to Alyosha and your eyes closed to the quarry opposite, you can feel like you’re in the wilderness for a while. Moss, heather, birches.
As I was making my way back around the lake, I made a friend. A Russian lady with a bag of apples (this is a motif) took my camera off me and insisted on taking a picture of me with the lake (and the very Soviet Laplandiya supplementary education facility in the background). We then met at the next viewpoint and she spent at least twenty minutes trying to show me something down by where I’d first come across the lake. She spoke no English. I speak so very little Russian, but in fact the Brit had the upper hand language-wise for once. I knew some very basic not-much while she knew nothing. I tried French & Norwegian (Kirkenes is less than 140 miles away) but to no avail. I got that it’s near the most, which is a bridge in Russian but not the bridge itself. I still don’t know what she was trying to tell me but I understood that this was a local trying really hard to share something of her home with a tourist and I loved that. Thank you, friendly Murmansker.
I put a lot of photos from the lake on Instagram, mostly with the same sort of caption: this peace & nature is so different from what I expected of a grim Arctic port city. It doesn’t get many tourists but pop by for a day if you’re in the area.
Next time in Russia (probably not until the New Year now), I think it’s finally time for that Religion & Romanovs post that I wrote in pen on the steps of the Church on the Blood right back in early September.