Ghost Towns

Most of the ghost towns in Australia were built as mining towns and failed as resources were depleted, such as Cassilis, which is an example of a gold mining town in Victoria which still contains a few remains.

I've never been too interested in towns which have “died” from such circumstances, or even those that failed simply because they were too far away from a highway — a common occurrence during the 1950s, it seems. I've always been much more interested in ghost towns that have a much more human story behind their ultimate demise.

One such example would be Centralia (Pennsylvania, USA); a coal mining town that was evacuated in the early 1980s.

Centralia was built on top of several large coal veins, which in 1962 ignited due to careless garbage incineration in the town's dump. With a fire burning underneath them, it's odd that despite toxic sulphurous gasses pouring out of the ground and several dangerous sink-holes forming that the town was evacuated as late as 1981.

Centralia's coal fire is nothing compared with Australia's own Burning Mountain, which has a coal vein that has been burning for an estimated 6000 years, and it certainly isn't the largest ghost town.

In Cyprus, the city of Famagusta was evacuated during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus suddenly when the perceived threat of Turkish air-strikes appeared. At the time, the threat was considered temporary, so people left the city in lieu of returning within a few days at most.

One area of Famagusta, known as Varosha, has remained closed since 1974, and for the past 34 years nobody has gained admittance to the area. As a result, the city remains as it was when it was evacuated — bar decay for lack of maintenance — with cranes still waiting to continue construction, brand new cars lined up in car lots, and the latest fashion on display in retail stores ready to be purchased. In fact, it was reported that even in 1977 the lights were still on in some buildings.

Varosha will remain a forbidden ghost town until such time as the dispute is settled, however the beach front is now accessible in front of the deserted hotels.

While Varosha will probably be inhabited again sooner than Centralia — where there's enough fuel for the fire to continue burning for more than 200 years — there's one place that certainly won't be inhabited again for considerably longer.

Over the last ten years, the Ukrainian Government has become more lenient on allowing the general public to conduct “visits” (but not “tourism”) into the 30km (282743 hectares) radioactive Exclusion Zone surrounding Chernobyl, the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986.

As far as that's concerned, I'll write more about that tomorrow…