Delegates, not tourists
ICOM delegates attend as representatives of the movement, subject to itinerary rulings, hardship, internal mockery, and occasional sanctions.
Public orientation
What is ICOM?
ICOM stands for the International Conference of Men: a long-running annual travel group of friends who go to unusual, often post-Soviet, Balkan, Caucasus, Central Asian, Arctic, or otherwise suspiciously textured places, then treat the whole thing as if it were an official geopolitical summit with worse lanyards.
The shortest version: clever, tired, funny men reject the sensible holiday, choose the route with more concrete and uncertainty, wrap it in committee language, and somehow turn it into one of the best weekends of the year.
Bleakness is prestige
Bad weather, awkward routes, brutalist concrete, odd bars, cheap hotels, border faff, and under-heated transport are not defects. They are texture.
The institution is the joke
A normal travel decision becomes a constitutional matter. The General Secretariat confers, the Politburo notes concerns, and democracy remains largely ceremonial.
How it works
A travel group pretending to be a state.
Destinations are not chosen because they are easy. They are chosen because they have atmosphere: Soviet residue, heavy history, odd transport, mountain roads, strange bars, salt mines, bunkers, oil baths, disputed borders, cheap beer, plov, or weather that looks like it has already voted against you.
The ICOM move is to take that real travel substance and over-administer it. Delegates do not simply go to Svalbard; they convene Bond villain ICOM. They do not merely miss transport; the matter is referred to the wheelbarrow subcommittee. A route is not awkward by accident; it is spiritually promising.
Canonical examples
What makes a trip feel properly ICOM?
Foundational bleakness
Kiev, Pripyat and Chernobyl
The 2009 trip helped define the canon: serious history, radiation-adjacent mythology, and the realisation that ICOM was not simply a city-break habit.
Caucasus energy
Tbilisi, Baku, Ganja, Armenia
Wine, supra, plov, Flame Towers, mountain roads, brandy, border ambiguity, and enough route logic to keep the Secretariat busy for years.
Bond villain ICOM
Oslo and Longyearbyen
Svalbard brings seed-vault solemnity, Pyramiden, Barentsburg, polar-bear caution, treaty oddness, Arctic weather, and the northernmost version of almost everything.
Useful vocabulary
Learn these and you can survive the minutes.
- General Secretariat
- The organising authority. Benevolent, authoritarian, and usually already decided.
- Politburo
- The imaginary senior committee invoked when the group becomes dangerously democratic.
- Sanctions
- Mock penalties, geopolitical atmosphere, WhatsApp discipline, and sometimes a celebratory chant.
- LongCOM
- The extended version: extra cities, extra days, extra faff, extra glory.
- ShortCOM
- A valid but gently mocked reduced attendance caused by life, work, family, or stamina.
- Non-COM
- A non-event that becomes lore anyway, most notably the Sanctioned Covid Non-Com.
- Classic ICOM weather
- Poor visibility, rain, cold, wind, or anything a normal person might avoid.
- Bleak train
- Transport as moral test: curtains, samovar, noodles, border crossings, and prestige.
Why it works
The nonsense sits on a serious base.
- It turns inconvenience into story.
- It gives strange, underrated places the attention they deserve.
- It combines real history and culture with very dry nonsense.
- It lets grown men treat a hotel breakfast, salt mine, or minibus problem as a matter of state.
- It has accumulated enough rituals, phrases, grudges, and route logic to feel like a small civilisation.
The important disclaimer
Not that ICOM.
This is not the International Council of Museums, although their existence remains a source of irritation because they appear to have superior lanyards and a troubling level of institutional legitimacy.
Where to go next
Start with the trip record.
The archive begins in Riga in 2005 and runs through Chernobyl, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Baku, Uzbekistan, Aberdeen, Sarajevo, Svalbard, and the coming Armenia chapter. The fastest way to understand ICOM is to follow the sequence and notice how the simple act of choosing a destination slowly became an institution.
Browse the trip record