NEXT time you’re having a little whinge about just how cold you’ve been this winter, give thought to the folk in the village of Oymyakon in Siberia, where in their winter there are only three hours of daylight a day, and the temperature averages minus-50C day after day after day…
And where on one day in 2013 the mercury fell to a bizarre minus 98C.
It means that car engines often have to be kept running 24/7 or they’ll freeze and crack, ballpoint and ink pens freeze and won’t write, and those who don’t protect their faces when going outside can find their eyelashes freezing and breaking off.
And when someone dies it takes three days to dig a grave in ground that’s frozen-solid, a succession of bonfires being lit in the hole to soften that ground because the deeper it’s dug, the more densely frozen-solid it is.
But at least the kids love this cold: when temps drop below minus 52C, they don’t have to go to school…
Oymyakon is deep in Siberia, and was first put on the map by farmers who walked their herds of cattle and reindeer to drink from its amazing warm mineral-water springs, and later Russian Czars and law court judges decided that with its miserable climate and isolation, it was just the place for exiling enemies of the State and others needing to be taught a lesson.
Russia Oymyakon tossing ice.rszjpg
And strangely many of those who survived their Siberian punishment in the State-owned nickel mines and forests that fed government-run furniture factories, hung on around Oymyakon at the end of their terms, with their descendants still living there today having married into Siberia’s Yakut indigenous community.
There are around 500 hardy souls now live permanently in Oymyakon despite its isolation, its weather and the fact it has no hotels, restaurants, theatres, supermarkets, churches or clubs, buses or trains, and just one “general store” that sells basic needs.
And they’ve developed a unique diet that includes frozen raw sliced salmon, horse liver that’s also eaten frozen, and a favourite main course of macaroni infused with cubes of frozen horse blood.
Such is life in Oymyakon, officially recognised as the coldest permanently inhabited place on earth.
David Ellis
Russia Oymyakon when the sun shines and the trees remain ice covered
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