A Zone of My Own

I am still reeling from the effects of seeing Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece, Stalker. The film came out in 1979 (I recall reading the Guardian's review); for some reason I didn't see it. It made a huge impression on my brother, and I vowed to see the film when I had the chance. Now I have - and what a film. Not an action film; a quiet, philosophical, enigmatic, existentialist film - but above all - what klimat. The atmospheric sets - Soviet post-industrial wasteland, struck an immediate, familiar chord. A new bleaker aesthetic than the sublime one, yet one in which I can more readily set myself adrift, being closer to hand.

Made seven years before Chernobyl (but 22 years after Kyshtym and some three years after news of that disaster seeped out in the USSR), the film is about a Zone, closed off from the outside world, into which the Stalker guides visitors wanting to discover its secret. More than this about the film I shall not reveal.

Tarkovsky shot Stalker in Estonia, not far from the then-Soviet Republic's capital. Waste and abandonment on a stupendous scale, watching the film today in the knowledge of what was there before and what is there now, one can appreciate the hatred and contempt that Estonians must feel towards the USSR for despoiling their country in such a way.

Indeed Tarkovsky, his wife, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn who worked with them on Stalker, all died of the same form of lung cancer which, it has been suggested, may have been the result of filming in and around the heavily-polluted waters surrounding an abandoned chemical plant.

Communism was a stupendously wasteful economic system; to this day, the remains of its misguided investments litter much of Poland; one is never far away from them. Here in Jeziorki, too, those Stalker-style klimaty can be found.

Above: the way into my own private Zone, just south of Jeziorki Station; step off the platform and bear left towards the junction where the freight trains once ran to the rampa.

Let us enter, then, on a drizzly, overcast evening in early spring. The ground is strewn with with overgrown broken artefacts, abandoned remains of buildings. Empty bottles litter the ground here and there as well as dumped household waste, this land lies unloved, unrespected, for it is no one's. The rails have been lifted, the rampa long leveled with the ground, but no new development emerges. Grass triumphs, and I must say, I'm rather glad. So much rubbish has been brought out here, slowly it is being swallowed up by nature, but not before more can be dumped on top.


What thoughts run through the mind as the visitor picks through the weeds and branches. Briars tear at trousers. Silence, solitude, abandonment. Concrete posts stick out in the air which once carried wires, and concrete covers cap drain holes. Concrete slabs lie like dishevelled gravestones. Nature will fight back but man will continue to despoil.

Post-industrial wastelands have a undeniable attraction. Stalker puts them into a personal and philosophical perspective.

This is all small scale. I traverse this little zone in the space between two bus departures, but to see some real Stalker-style landscapes within Warsaw's boundaries, check out Huta Warszawa on Google Earth ( 52°17'54.86"N, 20°55'15.28"E).

Does anyone have any other favourite post-industrial wasteland in Warsaw (or indeed other Polish cities)?

This time last year:
Warsaw's big billboards

This time three years ago:
Pace of development falters

This time five years ago:
Strange days indeed