Winters in your city may make you feel lazy. But pictures from the world’s coldest inhabited village on Earth will make you feel chilled to the bone.
It’s so cold in this remote Siberian village of Oymyakon that it freezes everything including people’s eyelashes!
Oymyakon, in the Siberian region of Yakutia, is the coldest inhabited village on Earth. During winters, the village goes completely dark for up to 21 hours a day.
It’s so cold here in Oymyakon that even the thermometer broke down after recording a brain-freezing minus 62C.
Even when it’s mind-numbingly cold in Oymyakon, 500 people permanently reside here.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, this village used to be a stopover for reindeer herders. The animals would drink water from the thermal spring there.
And that’s how the town received its name, which means ‘the water that doesn’t freeze’.
It’s not an easy task to get to this snow-clad town. No planes can land here during the winter, and it takes up to two days to reach here by car from the nearest major city, Yakutsk.
Routine life is a struggle. Residents keep their cars in heated garages and if they need to be left outside, they keep the engine running at all times.
There’s no chance that crops will grow in this frozen land, so people mostly rely on frozen meat. A few local cuisines include reindeer meat, raw flesh shaved from frozen fish, and ice cubes of horse blood with macaroni.
Everyday things here are a pain. From pen ink and glasses to people’s faces and batteries, everything freezes rendering them of no use.
And fish sellers don’t need to store their wares in a refrigerator to keep them from decaying.
Feeling the chills, aren’t you?