The Abandoned Soviet Spas Inhabited by Georgian Refugees

In its heyday, the spa town of Tskaltubo drew more than 100,000 visitors each year. Today, Georgians displaced by the Abkhazian conflict call it home.

While exploring the grand, neoclassical ruins of Tskaltubo, a defunct Soviet spa town in the country of Georgia, Ryan Koopmans kept running into farm animals. Lots of them. Cows lumbered through former hotel lobbies, sheep grazed in old baths and chickens gobbled through the halls. He figured somebody must be tending them and soon discovered who: ethnic Georgians displaced by the Abkhazian war some 25 years ago. "They're squatting," he says, "on a very long-term basis."

Koopmans' photographic series Tskaltubo documents the eerie, derelict spas and the people who have made them an unlikely home. "You get these little signs of life," he says, "a line of laundry hanging in a seemingly abandoned space, or a little drawing on the wall where someone sketched their old village."

The Soviet Union guaranteed its workers the "right to rest," boasting more than 180 health spas where they could rejuvenate on two-week, state-sponsored vacations. The most desirable sat in the so-called Russian Riviera, a subtropical landscape with blue skies and palms hugging the eastern Black Sea. Tskaltubo was among them. Construction on its 22 sanatoriums began in the 1920s, and by the 1980s, trains roared in daily from Moscow. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people bathed in its radon-carbonate springs—radioactive waters that could supposedly cure anything from eczema to infertility—including, in 1951, Comrade Stalin himself.

It's easy to guess what happened next: the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Georgia gained independence, and people stopped going to Tskaltubo. The following year, Russia-backed separatists in the Abkhazian region sparred with the Georgian military in a 13-month conflict that drove 200,000 ethnic Georgians from their homes. Many took shelter in the former sanatoriums. According to 2014 government figures, nearly 6,000 internally displaced people remain in Tskaltubo; some have been moved into new housing, but many still eke out a living in crumbling sanatoriums with broken pipes and limited electricity, water, and gas.

"They showed up in the well-preserved shells of buildings," Koopmans says, "but then quickly had to adapt and create their own makeshift means of survival, like finding where the water lines were that they could tap into or splicing off the electricity mainlines."

Koopmans is an Amsterdam-based photographer who has traveled extensively through the former Soviet Union. He first visited Tskaltubo's sanatoriums two years ago and returned again this spring. For three weeks, he wandered hundreds of empty rooms from morning to night, keeping an eye out for dangling electrical wires, falling plaster and holes in the floor as he shot with a Canon 5DS R. Entire walls and banisters had fallen since his previous visit (one resident nearly died when part of a roof fell on her) "The whole superficial structure is collapsing on a daily basis," he says.

His fixer—a 17-year-old local named Lucas, who lives in the nearby village Chuneshi—introduced Koopmans to the inhabitants. They welcomed him into their makeshift homes, their cracked walls adorned with religious icons and landscape paintings, pouring homemade moonshine and sharing bread, tomatoes, and sausages as they talked about their lives. Many grow their own food, tend animals, and raise children and grandchildren who have never known life elsewhere. "The kids have this whole area as their playground," Koopmans says.

That could change. In recent years, the government has sold a couple sanatorium complexes to private companies to turn them into hotels; it dreams of making the town a resort destination once again. But for now, the squatters—and livestock—remain.

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