Industrial Kolomya by Oleh Zavadsky
Via Flickr:
Kolomya is actually a charming and antique city in south-west of Ukraine. It is hard to believe that all these industrial jungles dwell in just two or three kilometres from town’s wonderful central square with a city tower and lovely narrow stone-paved streets stuffed with amazing architecture from late Art Nouveau and especially its division called Austrian Secession. These soviet nightmares are a good contrast to the previous times. I was supposed to write “good old times” but I didn’t because I fully understand that Ukrainians were also not so happy under Austrian monarchy. But nothing and no-one is comparable to Russia and Russians. While destroying the churches and killing most intelligent local people they built all these useless factories just to bring drunken Russian “specialists” to work here. While the first wave of “immigrants”, KGB and other occupation elite were settled in the antique houses freed from its owners, the second wave, industrial professionals, needed new houses to be built. And so the deadly mixture of factories, huge blocks of flats, schools and kindergartens were erected around old Galician cities. This architecture also symbolises loud bad language, vodka, cigarette left-overs and cruel sexual perversions — a cultural part of what was brought to us by Russians.