Europe on the edge of the world

Kirkenes is located in the north of the Scandinavian peninsula, on the very edge of the world. The latter is not a metaphor; Now, in early December, there are still a little light here, about three or four hours, the rest of the time is a polar night. Kirkenes is at the same latitude as Norilsk, but if there is extreme, natural and historical (the city is built as an appendage to the Gulag system), then everything is different here. Here people settled down to live, and not die. However, with a collective death, albeit on local minimal-retaining scale, they also collided here. During the Second World War, the Germans turned Kirkenes into an important base of naval operations; The allies responded with continuous bombing, 350 raids, only 13 surviving houses after May forty -fifth. If you like, this is a mini-drred or mini-man. So the words about "concentrated Europe" and in this sense mean a lot here.

Now in a city with about ten thousand people live (according to official figures of a local commune) representatives of about 70 nationalities: from Norwegians, Finns (Kvenov), Russians and Saams to the Australians. There are no national problems here and cannot be. And now it’s still curious: nearby the border with Russia, Russian ships come to the Kirkenes port for repairs, trawlers are waiting for an exit to the sea, inscriptions on the central streets in two languages - Norwegian (one of the two official languages of the country, Buymole) and Russian.

And more about concentrated Europe. She is in Kirkenes both industrial and post -industrial at once, not to mention the neo -industrial. Since 1906, there was a mine here, where iron ore was mined. Ninety years later it was closed: world prices for iron fell, the enterprise ruined. In 2007, it was again discovered: the mine first bought a Norwegian businessman, then the Australians. In deindustrialized Europe, where neoliberal governments to one degree or another erased from the surface (and from the subsoil) of the region a significant part of the "traditional" industry, replacing it with "creative" something (with "services economy"), Kirkenes is not an exception, it is an example from a glorious past, and a hint of enterprises, workplaces, strong state and strongest state and strong state and fuckers, strong state and strongest state and strong state and strong state and municipal budgets, in other words, a hint of a worthy economic and public future, which is not dependent on the inflated financial and spectacular sector.

Well, and as everywhere in Europe, only in rather difficult (to put it mildly) natural conditions, it is simply convenient and good to live here. I mean not only shops, roads, houses, transport and so on. A powerful (at the local level) cultural industry works here. In addition to ethnographers and local historians (their work is important in itself, of course), I mean contemporary art, which is considered the destiny of large capitals with great money. Once a year, the company of curators and producers Pikene Pa Broen ("Girls on the Bridge", according to the name of the picture of Munk) holds the cultural festival Barents Spektakel ; Artists, musicians, architects, scientists, writers, businessmen and politicians come to him from all over the world. This festival is also concentrated Europe; Maybe concentrated Europe Par Excellence.

PS The attached photos, muddy and erased, are made by a poor iPad camera in an almost polar night. Not a work of art, but evidence of an eyewitness. (K.K.)