How do the residents of Omsk use their only metro station?

The Omsk metro has its own logo, map, and tokens for travel, but... you can't go anywhere on it. There's only one station there.

Walking through the center of Omsk, you can see the entrance to the metro with a huge letter "M". Every minute there are people coming out, hurrying about their business. But there is no subway there, it's just an underground passage to the other side of the road.

The metro in Omsk was planned in the late 1980s: in Soviet times, it was believed that every city with a million people should have its own "subway", but construction could only begin in 1992.

The first stage of 6 stations was supposed to open in 1997, but the opening was repeatedly postponed due to lack of funding, plans were changed, and as a result, in three decades, it was possible to build only a few tunnels, a metro bridge and start several metro stations.

The stations "Zarechnaya", "Rabochaya" and "Tupolevskaya" are preserved at the stage of excavation. For a couple more stations, they only managed to clear the platforms.

But the "Pushkin Library" looks like a real entrance to the metro. Inside, too, everything was almost ready. However, today this station is only used as an underground passage, and the station itself is preserved.

And while the city authorities are thinking about what to do with this unfinished building, which costs millions of rubles annually to maintain, the locals have turned the "metro" into a creative space. Young artists and designers are now creating conceptual installations on hot topics in the metro transit. There is a whole community "Project M", which is engaged in the search for new ideas for exhibitions in the metro.

So, in the fall of 2020, a sculpture in the form of a bolt on a pedestal with the metro logo and the inscription appeared here:

Another installation was dedicated to the birds of the Omsk region, dedicated not only to the local fauna, but also to local residents who "flew" out of the city and returned back.

Publication from Project M