Last year I visited two sims created by Serene Footman, Dunkirk – La Digue du Braek and Furillen in Second Life. Both sims showed a virtual copy of real places in the physcial world and places that are not really famous or well known. Unfortunately bot sims are closed now.
On Thursday, October 5th, I had some time for a simploring tour and as there wasn’t any entry in one of the blogs that I follow, that caught my interest I looked up the SL Desination guide. This way I came across Khodovarikha, which is “a weather station located on the freezing Barents Sea. Remote and desolate, with a permanent population of just one man, Slava. Witness his ‘arctic limbo’ in one of the loneliest places on earth.” It turned out that this is a sim created by Serene Footman. And it is a virtual copy of a real place in the physcial world again too and again, I never heard anything about it before.
Khodovarikha, Russia in the phycial world. Sources wikipedia and http://www.furillen.org
And there’s also not that much on wikipedia about it.
“Khodovarikha is a point in the coast of the Pechora Sea located on a landspit projecting eastwards over the bay. It belongs to the Nenets Autonomous Okrug administrative region, which is an autonomous okrug of Arkhangelsk Oblast.
There is a lighthouse at Khodovarikha that used to be an important beacon for the Russian convoy route coming from the Yugorsky Strait in World War II. It was shelled in 1942 by the Kriegsmarine during Operation Wunderland. The lighthouse ceased operation in 1996. There was a small populated place close by that has been abandoned. However, there is still a functioning weather station in Khodovarikha.”
October 5th: Impressions Khodovarikha in Second Life (1)
Serene Footman’s Website, which I visited last year to find out more about La Digue du Braek and about Furillen, does still exist and there’s a separate site about Khodovarikha in the physcial world. I strongly recommend that you read that before you visit Khodovarikha in Second Life (I did afterwards unfortunately). Some of the buildings in Second Life and the whole set up make so much more sense, when you know about the background, about how it looks there and about Slava, who lives there. Here is the direct link to the page about Khodovarikha.
October 5th: Impressions Khodovarikha in Second Life (2)
On the furillen website I also found an entry “Breaking Ice: a 70 Year Story – by Tizzy Canucci“. Tizzy Canucci has made a movie that combines – literally, with a split screen – Second Life footage taken at the sim with an archive film, ‘The Great Northern Sea Route’, that was made in the USSR in 1947. The juxtaposition of real and virtual that Tizzy achieves here is absolutely fascinating. The video is about 10 minutes long and worth watching as an attunement before visiting Khodovarikha in Second Life.
October 5th at Khodovarikha in Second Life – a bizarre picture: Diomita in fetish clothes outside in the snowy cold with an aurora borealis in the background
Thank you Serene Footman for this very interesting sim and the background you provided. It was a pleasure to learn about Khodovarikha and to visit it.
Landmark to Khodovarikha
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Porter%20Islands/79/181/22
Website about Furillen and Khodovarikha
http://www.furillen.org/
Diomita Maurer’s Blog 