The Soviet sanatorium was a unique phenomenon that has now been well-documented. The central Georgian spa town of Tskaltubo was one of the most popular holiday destinations for workers and elites alike — Stalin was a fan — and at its peak this small town was home to 22 sanatoria welcoming over 100,000 visitors a year, with four trains arriving daily from Moscow. These guests arrived to intricate and stunning estates designed in the high post-war Neoclassical opulence that characterised the Soviet sanatorium at its finest. Their sprawling complexes housed hundreds of rooms, various spas and saunas, medical facilities and verdant outdoor space.
This history of grandeur and leisure is now a distant memory. The sanatoria were abandoned and then ransacked for scrap following the fall of the Soviet Union. These days they could serve as yet more fodder for the post-Soviet ruin porn industry. But another, often neglected story has been unfolding within these walls for practically the entire post-Soviet period, one that connects the 20th-century history of the sanatorium with the 21st-century crises surrounding refugees and migration. In 1992, war broke out in the secessionist northwestern Georgian region of Abkhazia and tens of thousands of people were displaced; the abandoned sanatoria of Tskaltubo were offered as “temporary” accommodation to thousands of these families. 25 years later and several generations deep, around 800 displaced people are still living in the ruins.
Photographer Ryan Koopmans didn’t know about the Abkhazian population of the sanatoria when he first arrived hoping to explore the “abandoned” Soviet complexes, but he realised soon enough what was happening. “The fact that farm animals could be found wandering through the corridors was clear indications that people must be caring for them,” he says. “Upon discovering the families, my interest went from a purely architectural focus to a fascination with the inside of these spaces and to learn about the people inhabiting them.” The result is Sanatorium, a series on these remarkable buildings and the people who live in them.
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