Deckchairs and Convicts — the unexpected beauty of an abandoned Soviet prison

Expanding before me was a long, cerulean lagoon, surrounded by tall, sandy cascades with deep grooves that, if it weren’t for the water, wouldn’t have looked out of place in a desert.

As the shy autumn sunlight danced on the surface of the water and cast geometric shadows on the stone, I had to remember to take a breath. Yet, just behind me, the crumbling compounds and mutilated chicken wire contraptions will let no one forget the uncomfortable history that heavily adorns every corner of this place.

The village of Rummu is barely on the map. Around an hour’s drive from Estonia’s capital city of Tallinn, this sleepy parish in Harju country boasts only a small stretch of grey flat blocks with peeling wall paint. There are no shops or restaurants, apart from a dingy looking corner shop with a hand painted sign situated in a residential outbuilding. To sample any of the corner shop’s delights, one must first brave an eldritch, unlit corridor, which – as a lone female traveller with no witnesses – I decided to pass upon. There’s an oddly calming sleepiness about the place. Yet, the ghosts of its not-too-distant Soviet past hang so heavily, I couldn’t help but feel as of perhaps I did have witnesses after all.

I stumbled off the 146 bus from Tallinn at the Rummu stop on a crisp October afternoon. The only other person disembarking the stuffy vehicle — an elderly Russian woman laden with shopping bags — gave me an unforgiving look as I inhaled the cold air and found my bearings. A large brown sign indicating ‘MURRU VANGLA’ stood in front of me, which I followed blindly, aware that I had just three hours before the threat of sundown.

A discordant contactless payment machine operated a barred steel gate, to which I tapped away my €10 and was free to proceed without any form of paper ticket. Confronted with three oversized army trucks and haphazard piles of broken concrete, I remedied my consternation on the lack of ticket by making sure the Monzo app had registered my purchase, in case I needed proof.

In the Baltics, peak season is well over by October and so scanned the slightly water damaged QR code in the window of a wooden hut which directed me to a self-guided audio tour in a choice of 8 languages. Told the whole tour would last around 2 hours, I scoffed in the knowledge that I’d never once made it past the hour mark of an audio guided history tour by choice, especially without a cup of coffee. Call me benighted if you will, but when are audio guides ever more than a monotone drone with some poor quality sound effects?

Little did I know that I would soon swallow that sweeping statement and surpass this audiological milestone.

As I popped in my headphones and faffed with my ear muffs, which for the sake of sound quality I quickly gave up on, I was quickly hooked into the jarring reality of the criminal justice system that had tyrannised the very ground I walked upon no more than three decades prior.

Built in 1938, Murru Prison (Murru Vangla), was – and is – no ordinary lockup. A forced labour camp serving the booming limestone and marble mining industries under the totalitarian Soviet regime, I was stunned to learn that the prison only officially closed down in 2012. Unlike Western European prisons where solitary confinements are the norm, prisoners were kept together here in large collective boarding houses. “In Soviet Russia, the punishment was other people,” the audio guide exclaims wryly.

“Many of the ex-convicts have secretly come back here, to reminisce the past glory of the place…” I felt the hairs on my arms and neck prickle as I became acutely aware of my vulnerability, a female alone, surrounded by rubble and wreckage. The audio tour was allegedly numbered, but after number two I seemed to lose sight of the placards as I rambled through the site’s maze of uncanny structures.

I can’t claim that the masses of busted concrete, meshed by rusted metal and marred by graffiti, were especially sightly. But I could not stop listening to the narrator in my ear, bringing the bones in this desert to life with his dark humour and perfectly timed quips. I chuckled to myself as he told of prisoners peeing in barrels of sauerkraut destined for the outside world, before swiftly moving on to an advertisement for their waterside cafe — which, to my slight disappointment, had shut up shop for the winter. Prisoners were used as cheap labour here, but this humour was priceless.

I’d seen photos of the flooded quarry online, but, these days, I’ve become used to managing my expectations…especially when I’m visiting sites off-season, and without a drone camera. There was no way I could recreate the long summers’ evening sunset bird’s eye shot that had gripped my attention online; there are also plenty of ‘iconic’ places that, in my opinion, look very different to the postcards.

I found a path around the back of the prison that led me along the waters’ edge towards the main site. The sun glistened optimistically as I eagerly paced along, still listening to stories of inmates’ creative escapes in sewage tanks and prison dogs that were fed like royalty.

When I came to the clearing, the cold hit the back of my throat as I took a sharp breath. What I saw before me felt like something out of a dystopian novel - real, but not real. A deeply ridged sandy peak, shaped rather like an upside down muffin case, protruded sharply upwards. The muffin case appeared to crater at a height of around 80m, but atop was garnished with a small crop of trees, which still held their greenery. I use the term ‘crater’ intentionally, as this could easily have been the film set of The Martian.

On the flat beneath, empty deckchairs made from painted wooden pallets were dotted along the water’s edge, facing a partially submerged concrete structure, one of the prison’s many outbuildings. The site continues under water, where this is now a popular diving spot in the summer.

I desperately wanted to climb the muffin case and see the view from the top, but the unnerving Brit in me needed to be 100% sure I was allowed to first. This was a former place of punishment, after all, so I daren’t risk a clumsy misstep. I saw a couple walking on the other side of the lake who  disappeared behind the muffin case, only to appear on top of it about 10 minutes later. I squealed internally, taking their presence as permission to do the same.

I was not prepared for the rush of wind as I came around the edge of the mound, almost knocking me over. There was a semi-trodden path up to the top, but to dodge the worst of the wind I had to straddle two of the ridges, ascending gently, with a bit of a scramble in places.

Reaching the ‘summit’, if I may call it that, felt like much more of an achievement because of the biting wind. So, making sure no one else was around and looking, I did a quick power pose as I got a bird’s eye view of the water, rubble and prison below. The sky was perfectly blue, the air crisp, and the low hum of some machinery in the background was oddly comforting. Yes, I’m the kind of person that listens to brown noise.

I stood at the top for some time, breathing in the air and letting my mind wander as I stared at the view. I then sat on a grainy ledge, next to a stoic crop of fungi that were sprouting between a ridge in the rocks. For a while, I just sat. Then I listened to the rest of the prison audio guide, chuckling to myself at the narrator’s crude, yet fascinating, style. I stayed until it was clear the sun was rapidly hastening towards the horizon and the dawn forced me back down the muffin case and back towards the road. I couldn’t help but keep stopping on my way, though. One last glimpse. One last photo.

Beauty is such a funny thing. We struggle to define it, but we know what it is when we see it. Rummu is a tight hug of natural and synthetic beauty all at once, but underlined with a constant, tingling shiver of sorrow and uncertainty. Nature has done what it always does – reclaimed its territory, but even if this site has been left for decades, it would have been nigh on impossible to completely erase the scars of human survival. At various intervals, artists have created murals and abstracted structures within the site - but crucially, they’ve not tried to disguise the history of the place. The paintings and the expressions here give airs of an adopted identity – even celebration – of life here.

For all its ills, injustices and sinister fantasies, many of the people living in Rummu to this day have had some involvement in the living prison and quarry. For right or wrong, it’s formed them. The area and what happened here remains a huge part of their identity.

Whether we like it or not – I think we have all had experiences that have forged us in some way or another. Perhaps they have been good ones. Perhaps some, not so good. And whilst I don’t know if anyone reading this could say they’d experienced anything like life as a prisoner in a place like Murru, we can hopefully all accept that sometimes, even our negative experiences can become some of the most beautiful parts of ourselves.