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By chance I discovered that Google Earth/Maps now features satellite of my home region in a much higher resolution than it used to before. So I decided to blogpost a virtual tour to the places of my childhood and adolescence. Welcome aboard this magical mystery tour, everyone! ;-)

On this photo we see the area from very high (20 km) above. We may see Tsimlyansk in the north, it’s where I was born. It’s quite old (soon to become 350 years old) Cossacks’ settlement and quite small one for today’s standards: with population of 15 thousand people it’s the smallest town in Rostov region. In the south, 20 km from Tsimlyansk, we see Volgodonsk (pop. 171 thousand). It’s just 50 years old, a juvenile age for a city. There I spent my childhood and adolescence, studied at school and university. It’s situated in the middle between Rostov-on-Don and Volgograd (the capital cities of two neighboring regions, or provinces). A big river in the center of the picture is Don, one of the longest and most famous rivers in the south of European Russia. The ‘sea’ on the right is the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, it was created artificially which led to flooding of many hectares of productive land and to forced relocation of thousand of people from their historic territory. All that to build the Tsimlyansk Hydro Power Plant. Now people swim and fish there, but lately the reservoir brings more problems than benefits: eutrophication (easily seen on the photo), blue-green algae releasing stinky and greenhouse methane… All these are the consequences of the rapid industrialization of the Soviet era. Towns are surrounded by a pattern of fields, it’s an agricultural region, thanks to the mild climate and productive soil.

The next photo (it’s a bird view!) shows us one of the Tsimlyansk districts (on its southern edge) where the house stands, which once belonged to my grandparents from the mother’s side. To that house I was delivered after I was born. The red square without label on the photo is that house. There’s a bazaar nearby, and a church to the south. It wasn’t there where I was a kid, instead of it we had a grocery store. That’s why I don’t remember it.

This plane view features virtually entire Volgodonsk: its split into the ‘old town’ (historic part, where the construction of the new settlement began) and the ‘new city’, the later and more modern part. The gulf divides them, and the bridge over it connects them. On the top of the photo you can see two channels: one for navigation (the one which connects the rivers Volga and Don and gave the city its name) and one for irrigation. In the northern part of the city you can clearly see the harbor. The city is quite green when it comes to the number of trees, especially its ‘old’ part.

A bird view again. Here we see a disctrict in the ‘old town’ (the bridge over the gulf at the photo’s bottom is the same as the one at the middle-bottom of the previous photo). The district bears the name ‘South-Western’. You can see the both kindergartens that I attended as a child. I was going to the northern one just for a couple of days, and then I got ill. Another one, in the south-east, I attended for much longer time. There’s a school close to my house (of course, the entire house doesn’t belong to my family alone, it’s a big five-stories high block of flats). The school was originally named after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (her story inspired Kim Stanley Robinson to name one of his Mars trilogy’s characters after her). Now it’s just Municipal gymnasium no. 5. Quite prestigious secondary school in town. Or it used to be, I don’t know how it is now. It has a swimming pool standing just by its side (and having a school of the same type at its other side, it used to serve as a poll station sometimes, and sometimes we would vote at our school too). I was going to the swimming pool with my father, sister and a friend. And then there’s a stadium between the school, my house, and the swimming pool. I used to run, cycle, climb, roll, play football, and fight there… I jogged there last time this last summer. Five tall sixteen-stories high ‘towers’ are quite new buildings. They were built after I went to school. We had a waste covered with high weeds there before, and we played there as kids.

A close-up of our courtyard, a bird view again. Our house is clearly visible, and the next house, where my grandparents now live (the same ones whose old house in Tsimlyansk we were observing on one of the previous photos). In the court there’re trees, football field, sandbox, parking lot…

Here they are, the places of my childhood. It’s funny to look at them from such a high altitude, just like an angel from the sky. :-)