Pyramiden Museum

The Pyramiden Museum is a small museum located in Pyramiden, an abandoned town in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The museum features exhibits on biology and history, for example in the form of taxidermal polar wildlife, geological samples from the surrounding area, a few archaeological artefacts from the Pomors, some information on the coal mining industry, and a slew of Soviet memorabilia.

Located 50 km from the regional capital Longyearbyen, the settlement was founded by Sweden in 1910 and purchased by the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1927. A prominent coal mining settlement, Pyramiden once had a population numbering over a thousand, and a flourishing community. While on Norwegian territory, ruled by the Governor of Svalbard, the Svalbard Treaty of 1920 granted significant freedoms to signatory states in regards to their economic activities.

Pyramiden – like the two other USSR-owned settlements on Spitsbergen, Grumant and Barentsburg – was administered largely without Norwegian insight, and according to Soviet societal norms. Among the facilities found in the town was a museum, a direct predecessor of the currently existing one.

In 1998, a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Pyramiden – still owned by Trust Arktikugol – was abandoned. For years it remained a ghost town, with only sporadic human activity. Most of the buildings, and the items in them, were left as they were. After over a decade of decay, Arktikugol started renovated the old "Tulip Hotel" in 2007, upgrading the infrastructure over the next few years to accommodate a minor tourist industry. Since then a handful of Russian workers tasked with maintaining the facilities and guiding tourists visiting from Longyearbyen have been living in Pyramiden. In addition to tourist and employee housing, the hotel houses a museum, which shares a room – adjacent from the hotel bar – with a souvenir shop and a postal office.