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The extraordinary world of Soviet bus shelters

368 views · Published 21 September 2015 · 1:41 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: KaFaDoKyA NEWS · 2015 · News & Politics

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http://twitter.com/onlyfirstnews It's universally acknowledged that the old Soviet Union had many faults, but creating weird and wonderful structures that celebrate the humble bus ride isn't one of them.

When it came to building roadside bus shelters, Moscow's former satellite states were streets, perhaps even highways, ahead of the rest of the world.

Before their 1990s independence, the Soviet states threw up hundreds of extravagant rest stops, giving tyro architects and artists unusually free rein to express their wilder ideas.

And so bus passengers from Estonia to Armenia have been able to pause beneath buildings resembling UFOs, majestic crowns and concrete eagles while waiting for the number 37 to come rumbling into view.

With many of these beautiful -- sometimes brutalist -- structures now crumbling away, it's a legacy that might have passed unnoticed if it wasn't for Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig.

Herwig, 40, first stumbled across them after setting himself the challenge of snapping an interesting photograph every hour while cycling from London to St. Petersburg in 2002.

"I was getting off my bike to photograph things I normally wouldn't photograph -- things like clothes lines, power lines, mail boxes and bus stops," he tells CNN. "And then as I got into the former Soviet Union, I saw these bus stops were actually worthy of me taking photographs."

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