Abandoned Wheat Elevator Grainery That Was Biggest in Russia

Yaransk Elevator is a huge scale company. Once it was one of the biggest elevator in Russia now it’s stopped, territory is empty, buildings stay abandoned. Here is the trip inside by Russian blogger Oesolod.

Yaransk is a small town in Russia. Was founded in 1591.

However we are interested not in a town itself but in its huge abandoned grain elevator. What is elevator at all? It’s a big building to store huge amounts of wheat grain. It gets ripened inside also.

How was grain stored before elevators were invented? It was stored in huge jars, sometimes was stored in dug outs in the ground inside the pottery jars. It was most common way to store grain. In medieval times they made those dug outs in natural clay deposits, first burned fire there to firm the walls.

During next centuries they started building on-ground barns to store their grains. Starting from Tsar Ivan III they started to make national deposits of grain for emergencies in Russia. Every city got its own grain storage, big wooden barns full of grain that belonged to state.

Starting from 18th century they started to build stone graineries in Moscow.

In late 19th century they started to implement technologies in graineries. Like drying the grain, mechanical loading unloading mechanisms. Then in 1860s first elevators appeared, first in Warsaw region, then in Nikolaevsk.

In late 19th century mainly rail road companies were building elevators. They were capable of storing around 6 thousand tons of grain. The more Russia exported grain the more need for elevators appeared so state built its first elevator by Russian State Bank. At that point Russia exported 80 million tons of wheat grain. From 1912 to 1918 around forty-seven total new elevators were built that could store fifty million tons of grain. Then 1917 revolution happened.

Then first Soviet elevators appeared. In 1924 first one was built for 1000 tons of grain.

After the World War 2 the elevators weren’t built at first, just large warehouses, because they were cheaper to build.

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