This weekend I went on a photographic expedition in the central parts of my home province to an area where I’ve never photographed before. We made several stops around the lake Ringsjön and shot in various landscapes and sceneries. The photographs in this post are all from a place called Söderto, where in the 50s a slightly peculiar farmer got it into his head that he should build up his farm to a bomb shelter, strong enough to withstand the Soviet bombs he was certain would fall sooner or later.

*Only the pillars of the farmer’s original house are left in front of the “fortress”.*

So…he built his “fortress” with bag after bag of cement that he carted to his place from the store on a bicycle, since he didn’t have a car. He may have been a very strong man, but he was pretty clueless about building codes or anything to do with how reinforcements worked, other than that it should be metal within the cement. Therefore you can see all kinds of metal debris poking out of the cement in the walls; bicycle rims, a bed spring mattress, soup cans etc, and it has railroad rails for beams for the second floor (which is way too dangerous to even attempt to go up to). The safety officer inside my head told me not to touch anything inside for risk of dislodging stuff, because, from what I read about the place all that metal in the wall actually made the walls weaker, not stronger!

Since the farmer passed away in 1975 the “fortress” had stood the test of time…sort of. It was interesting to see it and notice that such a unique monument to originality hasn’t been removed by the authorities. I suppose it is because it’s located way out in the “boonies”, out of sight of the politicians and civil servants. If this had been any closer to urban areas it’d probably be long gone by now, within months of the farmer passing away. Here though, it’s still around…for however long the cement walls are able to hold up.

I shot these with my Kiev 60 medium format camera and in a rarity I can share ALL 12 pictures from the roll in the post, because in my opinion they’re all good enough to share. I don’t often have that high success rate, so I better make the most of it when I do!

*There’s still construction material that the farmer didn’t get around to build with.*

*I have no idea what this lever does…if it has any function beyond the farmer’s idea of reinforcements.*

*Horse shoes probably don’t make for good reinforcement in cement walls.*