Closed Schools. Abandoned Temples of Learning

For thousands of school leavers, after a many-year marathon of dictations and tests, the last bell has sounded as a leitmotif. Saying goodbye to their school and their teachers, yesterday's pupils have stepped, with dreams and hopes, onto the new starting stage of adult life. However each person's path in life turns out, through all the rises and falls, achievements and failures, we are all bound by an unbreakable invisible thread to our school, our teachers, our friends. The wise word of a teacher is always with us, and their blessing before the long road. At different moments in life we return in our thoughts for an instant to our own school, climb the school porch and enter the classroom where there was so much that was important and essential. Reunions of classmates and teachers are often held within the walls of the alma mater, and a wonderful immersion into the times of happy childhood and youth takes place. 

Not all former pupils have anywhere to come back to, because their schools are not only closed but destroyed by mismanagement and indifference.

 

Mykolaivka, Donetsk region. An abandoned school

Climbing a Terrikon. The Summit of a Miners' Barrow

Terrikons in a mining region have always been symbols of the miners' settlements; without them the industrial landscape of the Donbas is impossible to imagine. These "dark barrows" lure conquerors of summits and lovers of contemplating town panoramas from a bird's-eye view. Climbing the newer waste heaps carries a danger - the rock mass goes on burning out, giving off gas and forming voids. The little old extinct volcanoes of long-closed mines are conquered constantly; the ascent has become an ordinary walk to a rock peak, and enthusiasts have created their own kind of health trails.

 

The terrikon of mine No. 5-6. Myrnohrad, Donetsk region

Myrne. The Mennonite Water Tower, Heritage Without Status

You can see it from the H-32 road, and it is impossible not to notice when driving the Novoekonomichne-Malynivka stretch. The only surviving water tower built by the German Mennonites on the territory of the present-day Pokrovsk district of the Donetsk region rises like a watchtower outpost on the western side of the small village of Myrne, in the Malynivka village council.

 

The water tower in the village of Myrne, Pokrovsk district, Donetsk region