On August 3, Yuri Shishkin posted a photograph of a sunflower that broke through the cracks in the pavement on Rudnevsky bridge in Vladivostok. For whatever reason, the photograph inspired local reporters to publish articles about the plant, including expert commentary from road officials and botanists.
Primamedia was the first news agency to notice Shishkin’s sunflower. Soon enough, the website was carrying warnings from the former head of Vladivostok’s road regulation management, Leonid Wilczyński, who said the bridge’s dilapidated state means it could collapse at any moment. “The bridge is still standing, but it needs repairs. There’s no guarantee it won’t fall,” he said.
The website PrimPress later published comments from a botanist who identified exactly what kind of sunflower Shishkin had spotted, speculating that it might soon start producing sunflower seeds. “In all likelihood, a seed fell out of a car passing over the bridge and sprouted under the asphalt where the soil is […] Such situations are, incidentally, not uncommon in our city,” the botanist said.
The news agency Data drew attention to a Facebook post by a local man who proposed naming the flower after Vladivostok’s disgraced former mayor, Igor Pushkarev, who was arrested this June for illegally helping his relatives win state contracts. Data even ran a story with the humorous headline “‘Mayor Igor’ Breaks Free,” but it soon had second thoughts and deleted the story. (It’s still accessible on Google’s cache.)
On August 4, just a day after Shishkin first tweeted the photo of “Mayor Igor,” the sunflower disappeared, sadly. Shishkin wrote on Twitter, “This city will never be the same. I blame myself.”