The setting could be any small village in France: winding lanes filled with teal shuttered cottages, a charming main square with a small school, café and boulangerie, and a church whose bells have beckoned the villagers to Mass for over seven hundred years.
The only thing missing are people. We’re standing in the middle of what was once a bustling, rural village called Goussainville-Vieux Pays just twelve miles north of Paris, but today it is deserted and empty. Doorways to homes lie on their hinges, and old tricolore flags from bygone Bastille days lie strung from the lampposts in tatters. It is as if the entire population of the village just disappeared in the middle of the night. A plane disintegrated and crashed into Goussainville-Vieux Pays. But it wasn’t just any normal commercial jet: it was the Soviet rival to the Concorde – the Tupolev Tu-144.
The village, as in many places, have been left as-in and can be visited.
Read more courtesy of The Society for Gentlemen Explorers
