The Valley of the Dead

The Karmadon Gorge and neighboring realms are stunningly beautiful, yet also wrapped in mystery and tragedy. They contain an ancient “city of the dead,” Soviet modernist relics, and the final resting place of Russia’s biggest movie star of the 1990s.

In a vast, half-abandoned valley, amid the imposing Caucasus mountains, there is a monument marking the presumed location where Russia’s biggest movie star of the 1990s perished. A simple marble plate on a rock and the figure of a grieving mother commemorate Sergei Bodrov, Jr. and his film crew, all of whom died here on September 20, 2002.

At around 8:08 pm that day, a 150-meter-thick chunk of the Kolka Glacier, situated on the northern slope of the 5050-meter-high Mount Kazbek, barrelled 32 kilometers down the Karmadon Gorge. Travelling at over 100 kilometers per hour, the avalanche buried several villages and 125 people under a 100-meter-deep outflow of ice, mud and debris. Among them were a 42-member film crew with Sergei Bodrov, Jr., who had come here to direct a new movie. The 30-year-old was at the peak of his popularity, having become a symbol of the new post-Soviet Russia as the main character of the Brother (Брат) films.

For Russians, Bodrov’s dramatic death made the Karmadon Gorge synonymous with tragedy (his son Alexander had been born just a month before in Moscow, delaying the 10-day shoot by a month). Previously, the remote valley in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania was little-known to the outside world, and then only for its wild beauty and the mysterious ancient necropolis located nearby. For Bodrov, this had seemed the  perfect place for his next film, The Messenger, a philosophical-mystical parable about romantics, travellers and bandits.

This very mix of tragedy, mystery and beauty is what drew me to explore the Karmadon Gorge and its surroundings. So, together with some local friends I rented a car in Vladikavkaz, the regional capital. Although the gorge was just 30 km away, getting there turned out to be quite an adventure. After about 20 km driving on a paved highway, we enter a curvy dirt road that ascends ever higher, along steep cliffs, into the mountains. This requires attentive driving, ideally in a 4x4, as we are reminded when witnessing the rescue efforts for a car that has crashed down into an alpine creek.

The monument to the victims of the mudslide catastrophe is located in the middle of the gorge, on a hill formed by avalanche debris. It commemorates Bodrov and others who are assumed to have been buried beneath the ground on which we stand. Despite the remote location, fans of the film star occasionally make a pilgrimage of sorts here, says a middle-aged man from a nearby farm.

Bodrov’s death in the mountains was a tragic irony, considering his love for the Caucasus. His first movie was shot there – an Oscar nominated film (1996), Prisoner of the Mountains, that was based on the Tolstoy novella of the same name. Bodrov played a Russian soldier imprisoned by local militants in a highland village during the first Chechen war. And the Caucasus played an important role in other films in which he starred:  War (2002), and the two Brother films (1997, 2000).

A fixation on the Caucasus is an enduring Russian cultural tradition. The nineteenth-century authors Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Leo Tolstoy all portrayed the region as a mythical place of adventure, danger, and soul searching. After the collapse of the USSR, such ideas were once again timely, as the North Caucasus became a hotspot for crime and state failure, where the borders, identities, and values of the new Russia were all contested. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Caucasian terrorist attacks and the wars in Chechnya dominated Russian news, while conflicts in Dagestan and between the Ingush and Ossetian peoples also ravaged the region.

Hardened by fighting in Chechnya, Bodrov’s character in Brother asserts his own personal idea of justice against the bleak backdrop of post-Soviet St. Petersburg’s lawlessness and hypocrisy. In Brother 2, the same principled character mercilessly fights American and Ukrainian gangsters in the US, insisting that Russian “truthfulness” is superior to a perceived American obsession with money. For his roles, Russians hailed Bodrov, the “Caucasus veteran,” as a “hero of our time” and an embodiment of a new Russian confidence in a period of great difficulties.

As we continue to inch our way up the gorge, we meet a babushka in slippers and jaguar-print blouse with what appears to be her great-granddaughter. They are idling about in front of their small wooden shed in an otherwise abandoned little hamlet. The old Ossetian women is called Zara and speaks hardly any Russian, but it becomes clear that she has lived here all her life. She not only saw the avalanche in 2002, but also a much less destructive one in 1969, which did not take any lives. According to geologists, sections of the nearby Kolka glacier plummet down the mountain every 50 to 70 years, so the next one had not been expected for another decade or so. Nevertheless, relatives of the victims, including Bodrov’s widow, sued the state (unsuccessfully) for not warning the public sufficiently about dangers in the region.

At the time of the 2002 landslide, trust in Russian authorities was at a low point. Two years before, the government caused outrage when its secrecy and lies clouded events surrounding the tragic sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea, which took the lives of 118 sailors. When Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, then headed by current defense minister Sergei Shoigu, proclaimed that nothing more could be done about those missing in the Karmadon Gorge, a stream of volunteers took it upon themselves to continue the search. Many were relatives of the missing. They erected a tent camp called “Hope” (Nadezhda) in the gorge and dug deep into the more than 100-meter-thick crust of gravel and ice left by the landslide, looking for survivors and human remains. Clinging to rays of hope, they posited that some victims might have found shelter in a valley road tunnel. A 20-meter-high metal well stands lonely and rusted near the crushed tunnel, now laid bare since the ice from the avalanche has melted away.

As the sun begins to set, we arrive at a group of abandoned, unfinished Soviet apartment blocks, a sombre setting against the backdrop of the dark summits. One of the blocks is actually a finished and inhabited apartment building. And, along with a few huts, it comprises the mountain hamlet of Karmadon. There we meet Marina, a pretty brunette in her late 30s sporting a shirt with the imprint “Be Different, Babe.” A flock of screeching children surrounds her, while elderly residents peek out from the balconies.

After growing up in Karmadon, Marina lived in Sochi and Vladikavkaz for a few years. But, after the birth of her daughter, she returned to Karmadon several times, eventually relocating for good. “I cannot imagine a better place in the world than here,” she says. “People in the city are usually not happy. They are lonely and aimless. Here, we are always with our families. This is closer to the original Ossetian way of life. We are a mountain people after all.” She smiles gently, also stressing that they are proud to be Russian citizens.

“There are people from all over Russia coming here nowadays, mainly because of Bodrov,” she says. “People come to see Bodrov, and they return for the mountains.”

Marina notes that many more people lived here before the collapse of the USSR, after the area was designated as a spa resort in 1962. A sanatorium attracted guests from all over the country, and another spa was set to open, but state funds ran dry during perestroika, and so the planned holiday accommodations were never finished. Herds of cows and horses are now penned in the concrete and brick carcasses – silent witnesses to the collapse of the Soviet empire.

The mudslide in 2002 further increased the town’s isolation, decimating the gas and electricity grid. For some time, a generator was used to power the lone block of flats. But now there is no central heating and the inhabitants heat their apartments independently. “We live off the land,” Marina explains. They have cows, horses, sheep and do a bit of farming. “When the state retreats, people help themselves,” she says with a smile. Marina is constantly active – one moment helping a toddler do his laces, the next gesticulating with some older men plodding along at repairing a rusty Soviet car.

Darkness is descending, and we are desperate to find a place to stay. Caucasian hospitality proves to be the solution. Marina invites us to stay the night in one of the panel flats that belongs to relatives that are away. With its 1970s Soviet furniture, wall carpets, and historic kitchen appliances, our accommodation feels like a trip back in time. My Russian companions try the outdated hats and jackets from the wardrobe. During the night, thick blankets and sheepskins protect us from the cold, and in the morning we enjoy priceless views from the rusty balcony. Soviet decay amid a mountain idyll surrounded by 5000-meter peaks makes for very compelling scenery. 

In yet another act of generosity, a crafty villager siphons gas into our tank to help us continue our journey. Ironically, it was just such Caucasian hospitality that may have been fatal for Bodrov and his film crew. According to one account of the crew’s final hours, Ossetian villagers in the gorge invited them for a feast, else they would have headed back to Vladikavkaz earlier and would probably have missed the avalanche. Marina says that two elderly men from Karmadon, Kazbek and Oleg, were present at the feast but went up to their homes afterward, while Bodrov and his team took a route down through the valley. When the avalanche came crashing down, they heard terrible thunder. It got instantly cold, and a vigorous gust of wind almost blew them away. But they were lucky – the avalanche stopped just a few hundred meters from Karmadon. 

The flood of mud and ice also spared a nearby Soviet sanatorium. The impressive modernist structure was abandoned after the collapse of the USSR, when government coffers were empty. Entering the murky interior, we are not alone: cows shelter here on every floor. They seem to cope just fine with the stairs, roaming past mosaics depicting cosmonauts and peace doves, or bas reliefs of happy workers and peasants. The balconies and the roof open up to breathtaking panoramas across the Karmadon Gorge and the spectacular mountain ranges that surround it.

Soviet workers and students used to come here for the fresh air and the mineral water springs – a tradition begun in the nineteenth century, when the Russian aristocracy came to “take the waters” and socialize in posh Caucasian spa towns like Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk.

Continuing over a ridge, we encounter remarkable relics of a time before either tsars or soviets controlled Ossetia and the Caucasus. A mountain slope is dotted with dozens of stone structures with serrated roofs that stand out of the lush green grass like pyramids of an ancient civilization. It is a necropolis from the old Alanian Empire, a state that modern Ossetians regard as their ancestral homeland.

At this “little city of the dead,” as Russians call it, there are nearly 100 mausoleums erected by affluent Ossetian families. Heaps of bones and skulls lie openly inside the structures, some of them three floors high. According to the national museum of North Ossetia-Alania, most of the structures are from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and were used for burial through the early part of the nineteenth century. In each of the crypts, whole family lines found their final resting place, their bones scattered together, making it impossible to tell generations apart.

Local legend ascribes this method of entombment to a curse. As the story goes, there was a beauty every man wanted, but they could not agree who would get to marry her. So they killed the girl, to ensure than no one would get her. As a consequence, the men died in agony, their flesh falling from their bones. The dead were buried, but the earth did not accept their bodies, pushing them back to the surface. And so locals began to build stone crypts for their deceased.

Dr. Feliks Kireyev, of the Ossetian Institute of History and Archaeology, dismisses this as a myth invented for tourists. He offers a more practical explanation: cramming hundreds of dead into mausoleums was a way to save space at a time when the Alanian Empire was surrounded on all sides by the Mongols, Tatars and Ottomans. In fact, crypts used to be quite common in other mountainous regions of the Caucasus, like Chechnya, Ingushetia, Balkaria, and parts of Georgia, dating to the time when pagan beliefs where widespread here. Yet this little city of the dead stands out, Kireyev says, as nowhere else has such a great number of mausoleums been preserved.

In the eighteenth century, the region was besieged by a plague, and the necropolis was used as a quarantine site. Sick families isolated themselves in the tombs of their kin, along with supplies of water and food. Those who could not overcome the illness died among the remains of their ancestors. Rumor has it that even today locals avoid the necropolis, believing that anyone who enters might not come out alive. 

People in the nearby village of Dargavs, which lends its name to the necropolis, reject this as yet another myth, but there is no doubt that the dead overshadow the living here. There are an estimated 10,000 skeletons in the crypts, but only about 150 residents of Dargavs. Ossetians lived mainly high in the mountains, a place not only safer from avalanches, but also offering protection from the many foreign armies that passed through the Caucasus. Only with late-tsarist era urbanization did the mountain people begin relocating to towns like Vladikavkaz (founded in 1784). After the collapse of the USSR and the drastic decline in state subsidies, still more people moved away from the villages, a trend that the 2002 avalanche reinforced. “My children did not want to stay here. They are living in Moscow now,” says an elderly villager in a flat cap.

While locals have been leaving Dargavs, recently the “little city of the dead” has been drawing a small, but growing flow of tourists. A hotel opened nearby, and guards have been stationed at the necropolis to dissuade grave robbers and collect a small entry fee. The region is, however, difficult to access, so there are plans to improve the road from Vladikavkaz. “We want to develop tourism in the area,” says Nikolai Pesyakov, a spokesman for the Ossetian State Committee of Highway Construction.

The outsized tribute to the dead here has played an important role in defining Ossetian identity, especially in times of crisis. When, before WWII, the neighboring Ingush people attempted to claim these lands, the Ossetians successfully used the presence of the necropolis to assert their historical rights to the region. But that did not settle territorial issues, and a war raged between the two Caucasian peoples in the 1990s. Relations are still tense.

The politics of remembrance plays a crucial role in other Caucasian territorial disputes as well, as in the recent Armenian-Azeri conflict in war-ravaged Nagorno-Karabakh. There, both sides have used ancient graveyards to support their claims to the land.

While the ancient dead at Dargavs have been mainly a unifying symbol for Ossetians, the necropolis is also a reminder of Russia’s multi-ethnic heritage and identity. Bodrov, the most prominent recent addition to this valley of the dead, has been portrayed as an idol of all Russians. And Ossetians, traditional Russian allies, seem to agree: “He is one of ours,” Marina from Karmadon says. Indeed, Bodrov, while not born Ossetian, was in love with their land and with the Caucasus more generally. “It is the most beautiful place in the world,” Bodrov allegedly said the first time he saw the Karmadon Gorge.

For the curious, geologists predict that it will likely be 40 years before the gorges sees another such avalanche. Plenty of time to safely discover this otherworldly corner of Russia, once travel opens again.