Where, where? Outside of Moscow! The village of Afrikanda.
There are many unusual names on the map of the country: village Slut, village Hello Again or Prole-KashaToday's story is about Afrikanda village.
📍Did you imagine a place with perpetual heat and dense vegetation? You'd be wrong. Afrikanda is in the Far North, in Murmansk region, not far from the Barents Sea. Typically, the hottest temperature here is 18 degrees Celsius.
To be precise, Afrikand is here two whole: Afrikanda-1 — a military town of a fighter aviation regiment, disbanded in 2001, and Afrikanda-2This is a workers' settlement founded in 1925 near a railway siding. It is primarily inhabited by employees of the Kola Nuclear Power Plant. A road a few kilometers long connects the various parts of the settlement. The total population is 1,5.
📍There are plenty of legends about the name. One of them is connected with Nikita Khrushchev, who visited these places during abnormally hot weather. "Africa!" exclaimed The head of the USSR. "Hmm," someone from the party entourage chimed in. According to another version, railroad construction workers, in the bitter cold, named the area after something that belied its reality—tough workers have tough jokes. Rumor has it that a prominent railroad worker named Afrikandov worked here, and so they immortalized him.
More prosaic version academician Alexandra Fersman: nearby is the village of Okhta-Kanda (where "kanty" is a dry place in the middle of a swamp, an elevated area, translated from the Sami language), and the new village was rebuilt in a humorous manner either by geologists or those same railroad workers.
📍And few people knew about that Afrikanda until a team from the Murmansk region burst into the KVN Major League.Village A team (Africanda)," where real "Africans" crack jokes. That's when the northern village with the "hot" name became a national talking point, and the team took first place at the 2023 "Voicing KiViN" competition.
📍And the military town in Afrikanda-1 is from the elite turned to a ghost town where life only glimmers in three houses near an abandoned military airfield construction is planned mining and processing plant.
Photo: ferrochrome, alexandragor
