Trickster Magazine

Tallinn-based jewellery artist Darja Popolitova gives us a glimpse into her hometown, Sillamäe – a mysterious little town on Estonia’s northeast coast with a surprisingly rich and radioactive past. With help from her father, artist and local historian Aleksandr Popolitov, she maps out a personal and poetic journey through a place that’s far from your average seaside retreat. Treat it like a juicy history lesson that goes well with a hot cuppa. Enjoy!

I was born in 1989 in Sillamäe – a Russian-speaking industrial town on the edge of the Baltic Sea – and spent most of my childhood and teenage years there. Think bomb shelters, abandoned Soviet factories, and a kind of low-key post-apocalyptic charm.
We’d hang out in a garden plot area called Sputnik, a maze of tiny Brezhnev-era allotments with plastic greenhouses and ramshackle huts. This was the stage for our MTV dreams – we'd dress in early Y2K fashion, stage photo shoots for Album.ee, and listen to VIVA on blast while trying to look effortlessly cool. I was also blogging angsty poetry on Livejournal.ru, using a creaky Pentium computer and dial-up internet. It was very much a time.

Sputnik garden plots – because everybody needs a garden where to grow their own beetroot, to drink Longero beside a rusty barrel with a bonfire, and to coexist shoulder to shoulder with neighbours, like sprats in a tin.

But Sillamäe’s story goes way deeper than teenage nostalgia. Most people think of it as a closed Soviet factory town – and it was – but its roots stretch much further back. The first recorded mention of Sillamäe dates to 1502, when a German knight, traveling from Narva to Tallinn, stopped at a roadside tavern called Thor Bruggen. From there, he wrote to the master of the Livonian Order:

The area would later become the Sillamäe we know today – but even back then, it was already a crossroads of power, trade, and conflict. The Livonian Order was uneasy with Russia’s growing presence (Ivan III had just built the Ivangorod Fortress), and the first skirmishes in the region had already begun – even before the official start of the Livonian War.

In the 19th century, Sillamäe experienced a glow-up of sorts. It transformed into a quiet resort town, known for its kurhaus – a kind of seaside community centre that housed a library, post office, and hosted dances twice a week. Artists, writers, and members of the cultural elite came here for the calm. It didn’t have the glitz of Narva-Jõesuu’s casinos or grand villas, but it had soul. One old linden tree still stands from that era, its massive trunk now reinforced with concrete – a strange but touching kind of urban fossil.

Among those who vacationed here were the Stackelbergs – a German noble family who had originally settled on Saaremaa before spreading across Estonia. They built a modest estate on the site of what is now the Sillamäe Brewery. The Stackelbergs weren’t especially wealthy (they didn’t hold knightly titles), but their estate still holds echoes of the past, mostly through surviving trees and old land boundaries.

Former Stackelberg estate, now the Sillamäe Brewery, shows how people often perceive Sillamäe as an ‘atomic’ town, due to the loss of Tsarist-era buildings. Yet the city has also a history of Baltic-Germans. The brewery produces München beer – the very same ‘copper’ beer my friend Zhenya’s father worked with at the factory. We would get it in unlabelled plastic bottles and fueled through our adolescence by this beer.

Ivan Pavlov – the physiologist and Nobel laureate – also had a summer dacha here. His dacha, among many others, was located where the present-day promenade is. From May to October, he’d come with his family to enjoy the sea air, gather mushrooms, and play gorodki with his relatives. Locals didn’t even think of him as a scientist – to them, he was just an enthusiastic gardener who gave good horticultural tips.

Sea-promenade. As the summer heart of Sillamäe, it represents a layer of social life, from strolling families to summer visitors, who often do not know that it was here, where the golden times of dachas flourished. Once lined with resort cottages, it hosted artists, writers, and members of the cultural elite seeking leisure by the sea.

He liked the place so much that, while in Italy, he wrote to his wife: ‘Yes, it is lovely, but it’s still better back in Sillamägi.’ He was competitive, too. One summer, he got into a mushroom-collecting rivalry with botanist Andrei Famintsyn. Pavlov usually won – until, one day, just before leaving for St. Petersburg, Famintsyn turned the tables with a record-breaking haul. Pavlov left his tickets on the table and ran back into the forest.

Sillamäe also shows up in the work of Russian landscape painter Nikolai Dubovsky, who captured the area’s moody sea views in his painting ‘Silence Has Settled’, and Estonian poet Gustav Suits, who wrote an entire cycle of poems called Motifs of Sillamäe – delicate, wistful verses that mirror the town’s melancholy beauty.

Dubovsky's sketch has survived for the painting ‘Silence Has Settled’, created in Sillamäe. Critics note that it conveys well the mood of nature. The artist Isaac Levitan highly praised the moment depicted before the storm – the viewer is left uncertain whether the fisherman in the boat will make it safely to shore.

But the real shift came in the 20th century.

By the 1930s, Sillamäe had become an industrial site, thanks to a factory processing oil shale – a kind of muddy Estonian black gold. During WWII, the Soviets blew up the factory to keep it from falling into Nazi hands. After the war, the town became part of something much darker: Stalin’s atomic project.

Next to the Cultural Center stands the symbolic monument ‘Peaceful Atom’. It depicts a man holding a ring of atoms above his head and, of course, is dedicated to the activities of the local factory. The monument was created by the Estonian architect Renaldo Veeber and was installed in 1987 on the site where Stalin’s monument once stood from 1951 until it was dismantled in 1963. A small prototype of the ‘Peaceful Atom’s’ monument is kept in the Sillamäe Museum. This miniature muscular figure of a man will be used in my curated exhibition (Februay-May 2026) as a backdrop for two drawings, and oddities associated with the theme of masculinity in general.

That oil shale turned out to be rich in uranium. Once Stalin found out, Sillamäe disappeared from the map – literally. It became a closed town with secret names like “Leningrad-1” and “P.O. Box 210.” You needed clearance to live there. Estonian locals were pushed out, and people from all over the Soviet Union – including political prisoners – were brought in to work in the factories, handling radioactive material with no real idea of what they were being exposed to. One former worker, Elena Antuševa’s grandmother, was simply told: “Wash your hands thoroughly.” People sat on crates of uranium ore without any awareness of the risk. The long-term effects would come later.

To fill the labour gap, the USSR brought in workers – including prisoners from Latvia and Lithuania who had served on the German side. If they had construction skills, they were put to work. Many young people were recruited straight out of vocational schools, loaded into freight trains without knowing where they were going. For many of them, Sillamäe was a true luxury. ‘Project No. 1’ supplied the town’s shops with bananas and sausages. There was a cinema and a Centre of Culture. The wages and living conditions were good.

Cinema Rodina – which in Russian means ‘motherland’. The building that once housed it is now slowly falling apart; it’s been standing unused for years and is privately owned. The owner is asking a big price for it, so the place is being overtaken by plants, moss and mould from the inside.
It was here that I had my 9th-grade graduation, where we also used to hang out in a Soviet-style ornate coctail bar with a billiard table. And it was in this cinema that I saw Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for the first time.

Sillamäe has a lively creative scene – there are plenty of hobby clubs: art and drama groups, dance troupes, and a music school. At the cultural center near the famous promenade-stairs, I often performed with the Bim-Bom Drama Club. I played the wild cat, and later I took on the role of a troubled teenage drug addict, haha. All of this took place beneath the relief portraits of Lenin and Marx that decorate the center’s main stage. The concerts continue to be held there to this day.

To accommodate the personnel, military quarters were built. Opposite one such quarter stands a beautiful building with two columns, which, unfortunately, is now deteriorating. This was the soldiers’ canteen. The emblems – a hammer, sickle, and ornate garlands of ears of wheat – are still visible on the facade. It served a propagandistic purpose: the ordinary citizen would see it and think that the Soviet Union was rich and wealthy, and the image sank into the public subconscious… Nearby was the army bakery. My father remembers playing there as a boy, hoping the soldiers would share the bread, which smelled so delicious.

Soldiers’ canteen with two columns is one of the symbols of the town’s Soviet closed-city past and an example of propagandistic architecture. 
Hidden behind bushes, it’s invisible to anyone who only walks along the main roads. The building is slowly being swallowed by greenery and covered in graffiti.
Once, when there were no soldiers left in the town, it became home to an art studio called The Cell of Professional Artists – the place where my father, together with Aala Gitt, worked before they founded the town museum. Years later, I had my own photo shoot there as an adolescent, with another photographer, Anton Serdyukov – a short-term boyfriend and friend at the time. Funny enough, that posy shoot was also done with me wearing black and less graffiti – only sixteen years earlier from now.

By 1948, Sillamäe was producing the uranium that would help build the USSR’s first atomic bomb. So, yeah, this sleepy seaside town helped fuel the Cold War.

Today, Sillamäe is still industrial – home to chemical factories, a power plant, a port, and yes, a brewery. But it’s also something else: a time capsule. What sets Sillamäe apart is its architecture. The Soviet-era grandeur – wide boulevards, neoclassical facades, ornate stairways – has been remarkably preserved. It’s like walking through a 1950s dream sequence. The promenade is still the jewel of the town, a place to walk, sit, and stare out at the Baltic Sea. There’s a beach just below and a quiet forest behind it – perfect for wandering.

I still come back. There’s a linden tree that survived from the kurhaus days – now reinforced with concrete. You can walk from the beach into the forest, where the air smells like pine and salt. It’s quiet, but alive.

I’m currently curating an exhibition called Heritage of Aleksandr Popolitov: Dialogue in the Museum at the Sillamäe Museum. It brings together the work of three generations of my family – myself, my father Aleksandr, and my mother Nadežda – across mediums like drawing, jewellery, video, photography, and installation. The show is embedded in the museum's permanent collection and reflects on what heritage means here in Ida-Viru County. It will be open from 20 February to 20 May 2026.

If you want to see some work of mine sooner, then on October 24, I’m opening an exhibition, together with Madlen Hirtnetreu, at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, the Neanderthal Beauty Clinic. The exhibition combines medical and cosmetic objects with materials like silver, charcoal and stone to invent a new, even more absurd beauty procedure, promising eternal youth.