A cura di @Uqbal (modificato).

Nel profondo nord della Siberia, oltre il circolo polare artico, ci sono immensi tesori minerari. E c’è Norilsk, la città dei minatori, dove, come racconta l’Atlantic, non è facile né entrare né vivere:

Every day for two years, filmmaker Victoria Fiore tried to gain access to a toxic, closed city in Siberia with no ground transportation connections to the rest of the world. Located nearly 250 miles north of the polar circle, Norilsk is home to 177,000 people, many of whom are employed by the world’s largest mining and metallurgy complex, Norilsk Nickel. It spews more than two million tons of gas into the atmosphere per year. As a result, life expectancy in Norilsk is ten years shorter than Russia’s average (and twenty years shorter than that of the U.S.).

A Norsilk, infatti, per due mesi l’anno non sorge mai il sole, le temperature arrivano a -55° e i bambini per mesi non possono uscire all’aperto. Nelle parole del Daily Mail:

It is also a city of surprising wealth – the reason for its unlikely existence. Norilsk, squatting 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, has the largest deposits of nickel, copper and palladium on earth and its hellish mines are thriving. Gulag prisoners began expanding the Siberian settlement in 1935 and over the next 20 years, 500,000 slaves took part in its construction . Thousands lost their lives.

La regione, come spiega il New York Times, ha anche un passato più antico:

[The port of] Dudinka, as well as providing Norilsk’s main outlet to the outside world, also offers a glimpse of the region’s past. The settlement’s natural history museum displays tents used by the four main indigenous peoples in the area. The biggest of these today are the Dolgans, a nomadic Turkic people that used to live off hunting and reindeer herding but were themselves herded into collective farms during the Soviet era.

There are now around 7,000 Dolgans, many of whom have given up their ancestors’ shamanistic beliefs in favor of Christianity. Smaller native groups include the Entsi, of which there are only around 227 left in the region, which is known as Taimyr.