THE INVISIBLE CITY (2007) / KITEZH - VLADIMIRSKOE (2013)

In the year 1200 the Mongol army was advancing on the city of Kitezh, in eastern  Russia. Just before their troops reached Kitezh, the city disappeared. On the site where it had stood there was now a lake. No one knows what happened to the city and its people: they simply vanished.

Every year on Midsummer Day thousands of Russians make the eastward trek to this place in the midst of the former Kolchoz (collective) farms. On the longest day of the year, so goes the story, the city again rises from the water. People walk or crawl around the lake because to do so brings good luck; others do so hoping for healing. Kitezh is a cultural trope in Russia. The mythic city symbolizes a better world, without pain and deprivation.

Since the fall of communism Russia has been seeking a new identity, a new direction. Particularly in the countryside services and the old certainties of life have crumbled away. People were promised a free world according to the Western model, but the reality is that the grain goes unharvested and the young people are leaving for the city as quickly as they can. Those left behind are generally the elderly, or addicted to alcohol. Many die before their time.

In 2007 Pieter ten Hoopen photographed Kitezh for the first time. With that series – small, non-documentary, primarily focused on the aura and the myth of the vanished city – he won his first World Press Photo Award. His follow-up has taken the form of a film in which Ten Hoopen now focuses on the everyday life of the local population. The dream of Kitezh, the dream of a better world in which things were in equilibrium, is still the thread which runs through it. But where in 2007 Ten Hoopen only followed that dream, he now uses the vanished city as a symbol for the present state of affairs in this part of Russia.