Their morning was cool

What was North Korea like in 1990?

Almost all photos from North Korea that can be found on the Web are either official or parades and demonstrations. Almost nothing is known about the daily life of people in one of the most closed countries in the world. In 1990, a resident of Tashkent, Yuri Magai, during a business trip to the DPRK, managed to take pictures without much supervision of the escorts. At that time, an international festival of Koreans was held in Pyongyang - its participants were selected through regional cultural centers by the Organization for Assistance to the Unification of Korea. Magai was in its Tashkent branch; he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Physics, in his spare time doing artistic ceramics. With the kind permission of the author, Lenta.ru publishes a series of photographs of the DPRK, taken almost a quarter of a century ago.

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