The Index
25 entries so far. Each one is a place I stood in with a camera — newest first. The list grows as the roads do.
A resort complex on the shore of Lake Sevan at 1,900 metres — two towers standing apart on the grass, a hundred metres of colonnade, and one whole facade built out of stacked concrete rings, all of it faced in pink volcanic tuff. None of it was ever finished. No glass, no floors, no guests — just decades of weather and one loose sheet of roofing working in the wind.
Fifty-four metres of mirror set into a hillside at 1,700 metres, four thousand panels, a five-metre secondary hanging over the bowl — and nothing wrong with any of it. Switched off in 2012, and nothing has come through it since. It hasn't been abandoned, though. People are still fighting to get it running, and still waiting for someone to fund it.
A Soviet regional jet standing on concrete blocks on a shelf of basalt above the Kasagh gorge, nowhere near an airport. Built in 1977 to work grass and dirt strips, retired in 1997, then hauled up onto a cliff by somebody who left no record of why.
A theatre shut in the middle of a working city — seats still in their rows, the curtain still hung, a 1942 film poster still stuck to the wall. From the street it is one more closed facade. Inside it is the best room I have stood in all year.
Six hundred years of mining at the bottom of an Alpine valley — silver first, then fluorite — shut for good in 1999 and left to the forest. The helmets are still on the desks. The river still runs past the door.
A NATO listening post at 2,196 metres, abandoned overnight in 1995 — they cut eighty metres off the mountain to build it, then left everything where it stood.
A yard of dead trams going green behind a depot near Milan — graffiti, rust, and rails that stop at the weeds.
A wartime landing craft rusting at the head of an East Iceland fjord — eighty winters of salt and weather, reached over a mountain pass with a view worth the whole drive.
A grand old sanatorium in the hills north of Milan — built to cure tuberculosis with sun and air, later a hospital. Huge, strangely intact, and quietly unsettling.
A concrete mine cart carried by two legs on the hill above Mitrovica — built to say that two peoples hold up the same load, now looking down on a town divided by a river.
Ninety-nine domes and a cage of metal lattice in Pristina — the National Library of Kosovo, one of the most argued-about buildings anywhere.
The tallest thing in the Balkans, standing on three splayed concrete legs above Belgrade — flattened in 1999, then rebuilt by a country that passed the hat.
Five concrete wings thrown thirty metres into the air on a Serbian hilltop — a star pulled apart and left standing in the beech woods.
Belgrade's brutalist twin towers bridged by a sky-walk and crowned with a dead revolving restaurant — a city's idea of the future, half-occupied.
Three concrete towers standing on a hill above Belgrade's eastern approach — the gate nobody photographs, and the one people actually still live in.
A terraced concrete resort going to salt and graffiti on the Montenegrin coast — every empty room still has the sea.
A circular concrete sanatorium hidden in the pines above the Adriatic — a modernist ring built for sick children, now open to the sea wind.
A modernist hotel built for a mountain's brightest moment, left to the pines above Sarajevo.
A railway bridge dropped into the Neretva gorge in 1943 and never lifted out — left broken on purpose, an emerald river running on beneath the steel.
An underground Yugoslav air base bored straight into a mountain on the Bosnian border — kilometres of tunnel dug to hide jets from a nuclear war that never came.
A concrete flying saucer abandoned on a Bulgarian ridge at 1,400 metres — the Buzludzha monument, slowly losing its mosaics to the wind.
A paper mill abandoned in a wooded valley north of Milan — not one building but a small town of them, a canal still running through the middle, and the forest coming up through every floor.
A grand hotel raised over the crater lakes of São Miguel and abandoned almost as soon as it opened — five floors of fog, graffiti and the best view in the Azores.
A vast abandoned children's holiday colony swallowed by the woods above Lake Maggiore — reached by an animal track, with one of the lake's great views still waiting at the top.
A modernist sanctuary lost in the fog above Lake Orta — a circular chapel, a fading mosaic of the garden it was named for, and the forest closing in.
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