#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Norilsk was no exception, although at first the townspeople skated in the most difficult conditions – on open ice.
In the 1940s, the Norilsk people skated on the ice the lakes in the Old City, and later – at the Dynamo stadium. In 1945, the hockey club, together with the skaters, consisted of more than 160 people. The ice was cleared from snow by hand, the gates were also hand-made, the puck was most often replaced by a ball, and there was no hockey equipment at all.
Since the late 1950s, the skating rink was made in Pushkin square, next to the new stadium under construction. In the same place, on the Zapolyarnik stadium, skaters arranged an open hockey box: neither the athletes nor the spectators were frightened by the frost.
Skates got more and more popular. The Norilsk people self-made ice boxes in the yards themselves.
In 1969 and 1970, the first indoor skating rinks were opened one after another: first in Talnah – in the settlement of Geologists, and then in Kayerkan.
Talnah and Kayerkan residents built them almost with their own hands and named them after themselves – Geologist and Miner.
In Norilsk there was no indoor skating rink for a long time. Finally, on April 22, 1970, the first hockey match was held in the Arctica: an unfinished, nameless and unaddressed sports palace. The new arena with artificial ice was a gift for Lenin’s centenary.
And in April 1974, the builders delivered the Ldinka skating rink. True, the indoor ice rink with a field of 30×60 meters received its first visitors only on November 7, 1974.
The reason is that Ldinka was filled with natural ice, which was maintained not with the help of refrigeration equipment, but due to low temperatures in the room. Accordingly, it worked, like its predecessors Geologist and Miner, only in winter and, according to many years of Norilsk practice, opened in November. Ldinka immediately became a favorite vacation spot for children, especially students from two neighboring schools, with which it was connected by transitional galleries.
In the last issue of the History Spot photo project, we told about the Avraamiy Zavenyagin icebreaker, which was born in Finland, but received the Taimyr registration.
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Text: Svetlana Samohina, Photo: Nornickel Polar Division archive
