Beslan

The bitterest of stairs

The stairs leading into the "City of Angels", the cemetery in Beslan created for the victims of the 2004 school's siege.

Mothers and Children

The victims, whom couldn't receive help from their mothers during the siege are now held high by them, helped by them to reach heaven.
The monument, named the "Tree of Grief" is heartrending: while the mothers hold their children as up as they can to set the forever free, their faces point down, not simply in sadness, but in an eternal, inextinguisheable shame of not having been able to help them against all odds, or at simply having survived them.

All identical in death

Beslan's Cemetery has been silently criticized. The whispers of those who lost their beloved ones lament the exact geometry, the identical shape of all the tombs, with no distinction between muslims and orthodoxes.
A forceful homologation in death of what is felt, in the region, as an impassable division.

After schooltime

Beslan's cemetery is filled with the graves of the victims of the 2004 terrorist attack.
Children and adults, orthodox and muslims all lie together in the large park, all in identical graves.
The statue on the backgroun represents mothers helping their children-angels fly away.

Water, even in death

The terrible deprivations suffered by the children held captive at Beslan's school's siege is commemorated by parents and relatives with water bottles and other beverages left on the graves and memorials, to soothe their children's forever unquencheable thirst.

In memory of Murderers-Saviours

Monument in Beslan's cemetery in memory of those special forces died on the day of the liberation of the school.
For some (and the government) they're heroes who died to save the children (the inscription reads "You will always be in the very heart of Beslan - Boys who gave cover with your heart to the children".
For others, they were butchers who stormed the school and precipitated the crysis, ending up shooting many children themselves.
Both views probably hold truth.

Golden flowers to entomb the Horror

The newly built "cover" to the Beslan's school's gym, where in 2004 almost 400 children and adults died after having been kept captive by terrorists.
The cover is strangely hypnotic, a golden "sarcophagus" to quickly encapsulate and forever freeze te past, like in Chernobyl. But it succeeds only in diminishing the strength of the charred and bullet ridden gym. It turned a painful, yet honest sacrarium into a distant relative of a tourist attraction. Gold and flowers mute the infinite pain that was suffered there, insulating it from the lives of the others: it forever detaches the drama from the life of the visitors going there, entombing it like insects in amber, forever there, but forever unreachable.

In between two worlds

The space enclosed between the new monumental cover and the old gym feels like it is suspended in space and time. On one side the bare bricks, the remnants of parquet, bullet and shrapnel holes, and on the other, the precise geometry of countless columns rounding the building. On on side a grayness that can never be washed away, on the other gold that seeps from the outside tiles into the columns. And in the middle, this empty space, with a lines of flower crowns standing there, like someone forgot them, or like actors waiting to go on stage into the grey gym, or even like surplus material no one knew where to store conveniently, and got left there.

In the middle stood the cross

A cross in the center of the gym, surrounded by flowers for the victims, and water to never forget their thirst. And pictures, everywhere, eyes staring at those who dare tread there not in disdain, but the expressions are so inappropriate to such a tragedy that they merely feel out of place.

Simmetry, and bullet damage

Beslan's school's gym, home of the 2004 siege.
The floor is charred, walls are littered with bullet holes. The cross in the middle appears like an out place tree in a barren landscape, the colour present everywhere (flowers, flags) feels like plastering on a crumbling wall.
Only the shadows seem to silently speak for the tragedy that took place here: harsh, diverging like ricocheting bullets, saving some, showing no mercy for others with no apparent logic.

Exit, or Grievous Irony

Inside of Beslan's gym.
Flowers laying in a hole caused by a grenade, remnants of the basketball field, and on the door a new sign reading "Exit".
There probably was an Exit sign too at the time of the siege: safety was so near for the 300+ trapped inside, and yet so impossible to reach, that the irony is most cruel.

Composition of Roses and Carnations

Flowers commemorate the lost lives of children and teachers alike.
Despite the writings, the walls are a barren, deadly grey blackened by smoke and pierced by bullets and shrapnels.

Nature morte

Posters, flowers, children's toys, and constant writing reminders "We suffer with you" adorn the gym.
And the newly built golden "sarcophagus" holds everything inside so no memory of the horror can ever escape, no testimony of compassion filter sip through.

Only the shadows can grow on such soil

The gray parquet is populated only by shadows. It has lost every hint of colour.
On the floor, flowers projecting living shadows, and bottles, commemorating the horrible thirst suffered for days by the kidnapped children held captive there.

A feel of emptiness

Between the flowers and the cross, and between all the various objects that now populate the gym of the former school of Beslan, there's an uneasy emptiness.
All the colours radiating from the souvenirs brought by visitors and mourners alike can't quite penetrate the dull gray of the walls and parquet.
To me, it felt like the tragedy created pockets of emptiness, as if different dimensions in a sci-fi movie intersected. Very disconcerting, and ghastly.

Running past the Past

A child rushes after the end of the lessons at Beslan's new school.
The school was built in record time after the tragedy, and sits just in front of the old one.

We remember!

The effigies of the soldiers died during the liberation of the hostages tower on the entrance of Beslan's new school, for all the children to see, with the commandment: We Remember!
They are being revered almost as saints, so no wonder that the second from the left hasn't even a photo, but has his picture turned into a sacred icon.

Puzzled and beautiful

The puzzled eyes of a young student in Beslan's new school.

People are blurry shadows, only the past is real

The head of Beslan's school points at pictures of victims and saviours in the school's internal museum.
In the new school, only the children seem to be truly alive. Older teen agers, and adults, all appear like blurry shadows. They exist, they live, and yet they are difficult to focus on, as if only a part of them belongs to this reality, with the rest having detached itself from it already.
The title of the page repeats, once again "There exists such profession: defending the motherland", which has been turned almost into a mantra in the school, as it can be read everywhere.

I only have eyes for you

President Vladimir Vladimirovic' Putin, whose image hangs from every public building, casts a serious glance into one of the classes of Beslan's new school.

Youth, and the defense of the Motherland

Youth in Beslan's new school, chatting amiably. On the walls a large banner reading "There is such a profession - Defending the Motherland!", and heroic pictures pictures of soldiers doing extreme activities.
The contrast between the lighthearted boys and girls, and the harsh reality the banner and the pictures only partially hide, is striking.
But promotion is everything, in Russia.

My right to play

Children playing in the courtyard of Beslan's new school, oblivious to the past tragedy.