Inside the crumbling abandoned Soviet ‘floating city’ with 200 miles of roads slowly sinking into the sea
HIDDEN, away from the outside world, is a Soviet-era Atlantis counting its days before collapsing into the sea.
Neft Dashlari, ‘Oil Rocks’, located in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan, is a vast network of artificial islands built by Joseph Stalin Meet USSR‘s growing oil to demand.
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Said to be the largest and oldest offshore oil mining in the world, the crunchy megasite stands on pillars mounted on the carcasses sunken ships.
The man-made archipelago was built in 1949 as part of a Stalin-led five-year plan after Soviet engineers found vast deposits of black gold thousands of meters beneath the sea.
What started as a single path at sea became a network of artificial islands, connected in 1952 by a trestle bridge structure built with metal pipes and concrete bridges.
About 200 miles of roads crisscross the crumbling and rusting terrain, which is essentially a floating city.
In 1958, large-scale construction of the settlement soon began to exploit oil resources under the Caspian Sea.
Within just two years, all necessary infrastructure, including landing docks, drilling platforms and oil tanks, was built and extraction began.
Everyone rushed to feel it [black gold]to put their hands in it and smear it over their arms and faces, hug each other and shout for joy
Seyyad Ibrahimov
a surprising bill of the first events was found online, with former engineer Seyyad Ibrahimov describing what it felt like to dig up the first batch of oil for the Soviet Union.
He wrote: ‘Nobody could do that sleep that night… There, off the coast of Azerbaijan, would be the first time oil was extracted from the depths of the sea,” he said.
‘Oil was struck at a depth of 1100 meters under the Caspian Sea. And when that black, thick fountain began to flow, no one could contain their excitement and exuberance.
“Everyone rushed to feel it, put their hands in it and smeared it over their arms and faces, hugging each other and shouting for joy.”
Over the next few years, the workers’ “floating city” was extensively built, with lavish attractions including a movie theater, a soccer field, a lemonade factory, and a tree-lined park.
Multi-level hostels, current plantsand even cultural centers were built to form a utopian world.
At its peak, the complex structure employed approximately 5,000 workers who lived in the gigantic platform that was excavating oil from the depths of the ocean.
In the first sixty years of its existence, the Soviet-style industrial city produced over 170 million tons of oil.
But with the slow decline of the Soviet Union’s economy, the mega-oil rig began to decline.
Buildings and other installations soon began to fall apart, with a flood worsening the condition of the once-hyped industrial settlement.
In 2012, only about 30 kilometers of roads were still usable – the rest had either collapsed into the sea or become too rusty to be used, according to a German publication Der Spiegel reports.
It is feared that the crumbling structure is slowly sinking into the sea after standing the test of time.
But dismantling the complex structure would be more expensive than maintaining it, which is why around 2,500 people still live in Neft Dashlari today.
Experts claim that around 30 million tonnes of oil resources can still be extracted – and that the site can continue to function for around a decade.
But with collapsing structures and rust-ridden areas painting the picture, the future of the world’s oldest offshore oil rig is shrouded in bleak uncertainty.
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