Rebirth Island. Aralsk-7

Voz Island (Ostrov Vozrozhdeniya, which translates as Rebirth Island or Renaissance Island), was an island in the Aral Sea. The former island’s territory is split between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In the 1960s, the island began to grow in size as the Aral Sea began drying up as the Soviet Union dammed its feeder rivers for agricultural projects. The shrinkage of the Aral continued and accelerated over time. Vozrozhdeniya became a peninsula in mid-2001 when the channel to its south dried up completely and became a land bridge. Upon the disappearance of the Southeast Aral Sea in 2008, Vozrozhdeniya became technically indistinguishable from the surrounding land. In 1954, the Soviet Union constructed a biological weapons test site called Aralsk-7 there. The main town on the island, where scientists and employees of the complex lived, was called Kantubek, which lies in ruins today, but once held approximately 1,500 inhabitants. The official Soviet name of this city was the same as the weapons complex itself: