Artek (camp)
Artek (Russian: Артек) is an international children's center (a former Young Pioneer camp) on the Black Sea in the town of Gurzuf located on the Crimean Peninsula, near Ayu-Dag.
The camp consisted of 150 buildings, including three medical facilities, a school, the film studio Artekfilm, three swimming pools, a stadium with a seating capacity of 7,000 and playgrounds for various other activities.
The group of architects, led by Anatoly Polyansky, that designed Pribrezhny was awarded the USSR State Prize in architecture in 1967.
[citation needed] Similar distinguished pioneer camps were maintained by several Soviet republics, e.g., Orlyonok in Russian SFSR and Zubryonok [ru] on Byelorussian SSR.
[citation needed] As of late 2008 Artek was in financial trouble,[4][5][6] which was solved when the Ukrainian Parliament passed laws early February 2009 writing off more than $2 million in debt (and more in unpaid taxes), barred privatization of the camp's land and obliged government agencies to pay the expenses of 15,000 children each year.
[11] The functions of the founder were transferred to the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, and a draft program for the development of the center was prepared.
[12] In accordance with the final document which was presented on 8 October 2014 in Moscow, in addition to recreation the innovative educational activities were identified as a priority area of the center's work.
[15] There are three ways to get to Artek: for special achievements in science, culture, sports; winning a competition of a partner organization; or for an amount exceeding 80,000 rubles.
[16] In 1952, Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet visited the Cypress camp in Artek, where he was appalled to realize he stepped on a former gravestone with a verse of the Quran facing up; years earlier, numerous Muslim cemeteries in Crimea were dismantled after the ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet regime, with the gravestones and pieces of them used as bricks.
Only when Hikmet complained was that particular gravestone brick facing up removed, but for many years it was not considered objectionable by the many Soviet visitors of the camp who saw nothing wrong with stepping on the tombstone or simply ignored it.
According to Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, this was a part of a Russian effort to erase Ukrainian identity.
[22] The camp was added to the sanctions list of the United Kingdom in July 2023 which accused it of being involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children during the invasion.
