The fire at our Institute began on 30 January 2015, that is already a year ago; time runs fast. We decided it was a good reason to organize a kind of a ‘party for our friends’ and to meet once more with our volunteers, with our sponsors, with people who granted computers to us so that we were able to continue our work soon after the catastrophe, and with our librarians as well—we work at separate buildings now, so they not so often have an opportunity to see people from the research departments. There were not too many of us, but the party seems to have been rather good:
These are some of those books which survived at the very centre of the fire on the second floor. We thought everything was completely lost there, but we were wrong: when the workers began to throw down the wreckage and ashes, books began to fall as well. In the evenings, when the workers went away, our volunteers were digging those heaps of ashes and extracting what had survived. Wish I could have taken part in it more than twice. It was the last stage of our collaboration with volunteers, the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations forbade us to invite them just after that. Now the rescued books are kept at several cold storage facilities, but our librarians are taking away those which are not too wet and dry them in the survived part of our old building. To dry all the other ones, special equipment is required, we were promised it would be bought this year 🙂
Miracles do happen, here you can see a photograph of one of them; this sheet of paper became a symbol of the whole our meeting. A brick of burnt paper picked up by one of our librarians, opened at the only survived page. The text is probably in the Church Slavonic, you can see the line В пламени незгорѣвшихъ—‘Those having not burnt in the fire’…
