UPDATE: Thank you all for the wonderful and thoughtful comments. Had I any idea this little post would get any traction, I would have given it a second pass before posting! I have since made some minor edits, clarifying and correcting some details and fleshing out the last two paragraphs a bit. Thank you all again.
Forgive my indiscretions, this is my first diary.
I am a google maps guy. One of my favorite things to do is to pick a city in the world and drop into street view and just cruse around. Nowhere else can you so easily jet from the fashion district in Milan, Italy, to the dusty streets of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and then to the packed streets of Tokyo, Japan, before you’re off again to do a little pub crawl in Cork, Ireland. There’s even a fun little game you can play: drop yourself in a city center and try to make it to the nearest airport, simply by scooting along in street view and following the signs you may or may not be able to read. Maybe it’s my ADHD, but having the ability hyperfocus on pretty much any part of the world at any particular time is like catnip to me.
Usually my forays around the world are random. I’ll purposely choose a city I’ve never heard of, or visit a part of the world I’m not familiar with. Other times, I want to see specific things. Cruising down Seacoast drive in San Diego is a nice excursion in the winter. Visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Colosseum in Rome is never boring. Even visiting old neighborhoods I’ve lived in can be a fun nostalgia trip.
Naturally, with all that has been going on in Ukraine, I have been spending a lot of time around Kyiv, Odesa, Chernobyl, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
For instance, when you zoom in on Mariupol in google maps, the first thing you will probably notice is the rusty brown scar sitting on the coast of the Sea of Azov. Azovstal Steelworks. If you click on the name, you get some information, and a little disclaimer from google that pops up on just about every business in Ukraine you select:
“Information about this place may be outdated. Always pay attention to real-world conditions, which may be rapidly changing.”
This I would describe as an understatement.
North of Azovstal, across the verdant green swath of the Kal’mius River’s riparian zone, is another brown scar: Metalurhichnyy Kombinat. Another massive steel plant that undoubtedly saw some horrific combat. Here, you can pick up your little yellow person on the lower right of the google maps window and you’ll see a sprinkling of blue dots- photospheres captured by anyone with a phone and some tech know-how and uploaded to google maps for all to see. Drop your little yellow person over one of the dots and you are instantly transported to a 360-degree panorama.
These blue dots, you may notice, are scattered all over the place.
You may also notice that they all predate Russia’s Illegal invasion of sovereign Ukraine.
Take the Neptun, and my impetus for writing this diary. An indoor swimming pool located in a westerly spot between Metalurhichnyy Kombinat and Azovstal. Directly west of the grey, square building is a little plaza. There is a little blue dot here. Drop your little yellow person and you’ll be taken to a drone view overlooking the area. The date the Photosphere was taken? February 2022.
In this photosphere, you can see things as they never will be again. Intact buildings, people queueing at the bus stop, a trio kibitzing beneath a tree, shoppers on the sidewalks, and what looks like construction workers entering a work site just north of the pool. I doubt any of them could imagine what was coming in the following weeks. It is… haunting. This photosphere (and countless others around all points Ukraine) show us ghosts from the other side of a starkly delineated point in time. One can only hope that every individual in this photosphere is still alive, somewhere, somehow.
So that’s it, I don’t have a fitting wrap-up for my diary, just wanted to tell someone that this little peek into history exists, and makes me both profoundly sad for the people and profoundly grateful for the technology that allows us to preserve the way things were in better times.
Here’s a link to the photosphere: goo.gl/…
The coordinates are: 47.13074944575353, 37.566354935789526
Thank you for reading! If you have any interesting spots in google maps you would recommend visiting, I would love to hear about them in the comments.
Slava Ukraini/СлаваУкраїні.
