Urban Exploration - Diogenes' Hangar

We received photos from a traveler and compiled them into a historical summary.

This short report concerns two sites located barely a hundred meters apart. First, a hangar where cars are stored. Then, just a little further up, barely a hundred meters away, an abandoned house with a garden filled with rusted car frames.

This town is hideous and repulsive at the same time: I feel a certain malaise every time I pass through it. A former coal-mining town, it reached its peak with over 10,000 inhabitants a century ago. Today, it barely counts 2,000, and its population continues to dwindle every year.

It sits in a small valley—a dark atmosphere. The layout is elongated, dominated by roads, dilapidated, and very dirty. The town hall has given up. It’s total decay: rotting social housing, incoherent roads, and deserted shops. Despite this, there is no sense of delinquency, but rather of poor people at the end of a poor dead-end, in a forgotten place left to mold.

In short, what could have led to these two places coexisting like this, if not as a full testament to this decay?

The hangar is packed to the gills. A Diogenes case? If cars could be stacked on top of each other to fit more in, they would be. But it’s not just cars; you find everything there—and I mean "everything"—buried under a thick, intensely filthy layer. Vinyl records, champagne. But why? Leaving that place, it’s the only question that remains.

The other site is an abandoned house. In any case, almost a quarter of the buildings in this town are unoccupied. Oh, there’s nothing here for beautiful photography projects. Storefronts are shuttered, closed for ages, sometimes disgusting. Here, on the heights, is a dwelling that almost reeks of petty schemes and, who knows, a hasty departure—but let’s not speak too soon; we know nothing.