Ochamchire (aka Ochamchira) sits on the Black Sea, near the unofficial border with Georgia. It lies within the Russian only recognised state of Abkhazia. After the 1991-2 war with Georgia, it claimed independence from Georgia. Ethnic cleansing of Georgians from Abkhazia followed. Where once nearly 70% of inhabitants of Ochamchire were ethnically Georgian, now only 10% are. The population has crashed from 20,000 before the conflict, to 5,000 today. Another side effect of the war is that all the factories in the area closed. Lack of investment, trading partners and most of all, workers/talent to run them. Canning plants, two tea factories, a tobacco-fermentation enterprise, an industrial plant, and a poultry farm were all built here in the Soviet era.

The most dominant factory on the landscape here, is the abandoned bread factory. It's tall silos tower over the area. I went early in the morning to get the best of the morning light.

Inside pipes from the silos above hang down.

Lift doors opening onto a room with a chute from above.

Although the buckets in the belt look bread sized, I would want to say that they held the dough for the bread, but they might have done. The joy of visiting factories where you have little clue as to what did what etc.

The ransacked fuse boards in the control room.

I have no idea what this is, not even going to guess! Looked different though.

Seems odd for nature to start to take control of one of the upper floors. One wonders if there might be a forest here one day...

One of the best things about visiting the factory, was the views from the roof, especially in the early morning sun. After here, I went over to the apartment block on the horizon, also abandoned

The whole of Abkhazia that I saw was so lush with greenery, clearly shown in the picture below. It reminded me a lot of Vietnam. The Water tower in the centre of the picture, stands next to the shed for the trains used to shuttle wagons about. An abandoned home in the foreground.

Abandoned admin buildings around the site, the faint shadow of the mountains in the background.

Transportation area, where trucks would take the bread away to expectant customers, sat with marmite on knife, ready to cut soldiers for their soft boiled eggs.

Alternatively, the bread could have gone out by train, or the trains brought in the raw ingredients. Who knows, but there's definitely some train tracks here.

A conveyor belt crossing from the building with loading bay and train tracks, into the main factory.

Most of the outlying buildings were either sealed, or had people living in them.

Moving to the other side of Ochamchire, there was a sprawling factory, with lots of different buildings spread over the site. It's listed as an 'Oil Extraction Plant', and I'm not going to argue with that. There was definitely something of the chemical nature about the site.

roofless building with adjoining office block or research lab.

A pick 'n mix of pipes dangling from the ceiling.

The other end of the platform of the skeletal building. The buildings didn't look at all safe, so i decided to not risk it.

This is listed as 'School No.5', one assumes it was abandoned due to lack of kids to fill it. I couldn't be bothered to go over to it, as I knew it'd just be an empty soviet building with drab grey walls. I was also running out of time, before getting the opportunity to negotiate with the very (un)reasonable taxi drivers.