"On Aug. 13, 1963, I forced my way into an Almaty branch with a sawed-off shotgun. I pointed the gun at the cashier. She gave me five rubles. That's all she had, because the bank had just opened."
He was caught immediately. The investigators were unmoved by the story of his dream of building a castle. They took it as the ravings of a lunatic and he was sentenced to two years in a psychiatric hospital.
"Those were awful times. To this day I don't know what they cured me of. Maybe I really am sick," Plotnikov says.
He made his first stab at building a castle near Almaty, but there were too few rocks there and he had to drag them from far away. Then some friends showed him the site in the Aksay Gorge.
After two decades, he's built about half the bastion of his dreams. According to his plan, it should have two towers with a round arch in the middle.
"I won't have time to finish it before I die, but I hope someone will continue my work," Plotnikov says. "Maybe once it's finished, someone can open a restaurant here.
"There's a saying that a man should achieve three things before he dies: build a house, plant a tree and have a son. I don't have children, but I'm leaving a fortress. And maybe someone will remember Ivan."
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