My last trip to the Molotov Line, just a couple of days ago, proved to be an ultimate failure. Lots of uselessly burnt fuel, lots of driving on dusty roads and ploughing my way through dark, swampy thickets. All in vain. There was not even a trace of things I was looking for. Judging it from a different perspective I could say that another swath of terrain was checked thoroughly...

While lurking there I noticed a tree which looked somewhat apocalyptic to me so I tried to approach it to take a snap - only to be stopped dead in my tracks by a menacing sight of a terrifying predator waiting in ambush. I then realized that I made 200 kilometers to come to this place and I had not seen a single elephant, rhino or even a lion. The area was utterly cleansed... and I knew who, or what was behind it... Monster eyed me lazily, probably considering a puny human to be a sorrowful prey, not worth the usual effort of beheading the victim with a lightning speed. It seemed to wait for a more sizeable morsel, possibly a whale from a nearby water-filled hole.
I took a snap and then run pell-mell to my car. I throw my camera bag inside and, not bothering to slam the door shut, I drove off Mad-Max style across the fields - never to come back again.

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Tags:   texture tree sky landscape fine art Poland branches clouds trees photography stylized faded water color textured cows vintage Piotr Tyminski outdoor animal

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This small pillbox, designed for one heavy machine gun, still retains its original protective embankment.
As soon as construction work was finished outer walls were covered with tar to prevent moisture from eroding the concrete. The black smudges are still clearly visible. Once it dried, stones were piled up against the walls and covered with sand/earth to form embankments providing additional protection against direct artillery hits.

This one was processed 50% with OnOne Perfect Photo Suite and 50% with NIK Color Efex Pro. Pulled froma single RAW with ACDSee Pro 8 (a sort of Lightroom in case you wonder, but WAY faster. Some dynamic contrast added selectively + some vignette blur, these done in Perfect Effects module. Then squeezed through a preset which I developed in NIK Color Efex Pro - for a kind of smooth look I was after.

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Tags:   abandoned bunker derelict fortification history Linia Mołotowa military Molotov Line pentax pillbox shelter Soviet urban exploration urbex WW2 бункер заброшенные podlaskie Polska PL decay Art Poland Pentax Art HDR landscape nik software onone software Visualmanuscripts

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Whoever - or whatever - lurks beyond the gate, in the foggy swamp below, is not from this world.
From "Anybody out there?" series.

Crafted with OnOne Perfect Photo Suite 9 with textures by Jaime Ibarra.

This photo is Best on black at Fluidr

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Tags:   tree landscape fine art Poland forest branches fog mist photography color textured Pentax Art onone software Visualmanuscripts

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In 1939 when Germany and Soviet Russia attacked Poland they affectively partitioned the country 50/50. The new German-Soviet border in the middle and south of "former Poland" ran mostly along the big Bug river.
Further north though, the river curved westwards and the border was drawn more or less vertically on the north-south axis. In this way Germans were already firmly established on the eastern part of the river barrier and this is where the Soviets massed most of their formidable concrete pillboxes of the Molotov Line. They sensibly assumed that no enemy would bother to force a river crossing when only couple of kilometers to the north the secret Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact has placed that possible enemy on the eastern riverbank already.
Yet, even that secondary strategic direction was not left undefended. Over the years we had mapped the area thourougly but still there were small gaps which made us slepless and this is where I happily lurked very recently.
Of course, there are no formidable pillboxes of the usual type but way back in 1941 there were dozens of simple bunkers which dotted the landscape there. They were built from concrete and stones - collected by the farmers forced to labour for their new Soviet masters - and were reinforced by huge wodden logs covered with earth embankments. They were simple, cheap and effective. And there were lots of them.
Unfortunately, their simplicity became their curse, too. Most were levelled after the war - nobody wants to have a mountain in the middle of his farmland! Those which remained are usually hidden in the forests with just a handful remaining on the fields. They are difficult to find and mapping them is not an easy task. After all, not every hole in the ground can be traced back to 1941 so you need to know what you are looking for.

What you see on the photo is what remains from one of those bunkers - a little embankment and a cluster of trees:)
Yet there is also a little story attached to this very place. And old man living nearby remembered perfectly that his father, once the Soviets fled, immediately helped himself to a huge amount of freshly cut wooden logs and he hauled a ton of them to his farmyard, apparently a quantity big enough to build a new house or a barn. And then the Germans came...
They reckoned that he had stockpiled far more than he could ever use himself and they immediately ordered him to share the wood with another farmer whose house got burnt.
This small tale also shows that maybe not all human beings should always be judged by the color of the uniform they happen to wear - even when war is raging all around.

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Tags:   history military Soviet ww2 Molotov Line pillbox bunker fortification mazowieckie Polska PL landscape Pentax Art tree Visualmanuscripts

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Another shot of this majestic ruin for you to enjoy. The left wing, bombed and burned in 1939, is missing. Some portions of the walls, along with a massive foundation (not visible on the photo) still remain and while heavily overgrown with bushes can provide a great vantage point from which converging Vistula and Narew rivers are perfectly visible.
In fact, Narew river flows just behind the granary, the walls seem to rise straight from the water, while Vistula river is maybe 100 meters in front of the main entrance. Both rivers are not really “regulated” here and they both run beautifully wild.
The building proved to be a relatively easy target for the German bombers in 1939. It was huge and aligned so perfectly in a place where the two rivers converged that the smart pilots almost “flew by the wire”. At that time it was used as a storage for the army engineers' material time so it made an inviting target.
It was said that the architect Jan Jakub Gaya made the main gate (or antrance) too beautiful, making it look like “arc de triomphe” for the hated tsar Nicolas I Romanov who, in 1844, was both the Emperor of Russia and the King of Poland (and the Grand Duke of Finland for that matter).
Today we can only be thankful to Gaya since what he had designed, despite heavy damage and merciless passage of time, is still a majestic and beautiful construction, a true sight to behold.

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Tags:   abandoned decay derelict fortification fortress military Modlin urban exploration urbex Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki mazowieckie Polska PL HDR Pentax Art Poland architecture texture Pentax Art Visualmanuscripts

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