Norway has sovereignty over Svalbard, according to the terms of the Svalbard Treaty of 1920.
But then, so did almost everything else at this extreme latitude. With several concentric layers of rock diminishing into the cold sky, the pyramid-like mountain looked quite peculiar. “They say we made that, too,” he said, waving a hand up at the distinctive peak that gives this old coal town its name, in a dismissal of the various rumors that surround this place. No such tricks were employed to usher out its residents. Not so, said Sergei, who offered a less sinister explanation: The town was deserted - mainly for economic reasons - in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Sergei shook his head before I’d even finished my question. According to the rumor, it had been abandoned ever since, frozen in time at the top of the world. I’d heard that in 1998 the Russian government had tricked the town’s 1,000 residents into taking a holiday on the mainland, only to close the mine and forbid them from returning. We were standing at the rudimentary dock in Pyramiden, a ghost town on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in the High Arctic. Sergei Chernikov, my guide, had a bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder - in case we came across any polar bears, he said, or in case they came across us.
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