Exploring Chernobyl

The soundtrack of the day was Radioactivity by Kraftwerk, as we rolled into Chernobyl this morning. I felt a slight chill at the sight of the empty streets of Pripyat. The silence. The abandoned Ferris wheel. The grass where children will never play again. Soviet rural life locked in time.

And Reactor 4 is ever present and ominous like Mount Doom. On April 26 in 1986, it exploded during a systems test and released radioactive particles into the atmosphere which spread over USSR, northern Europe and Scandinavia. I vividly remember the incident even though I was quite young at the time. Now I have been standing a hundred meters away from the beast.

Reactor 4 in Chernobyl.

I visit the site with dubious emotions. It’s probably number one on the list of dark tourism and it feels slightly awkward to visit a place of such tragic dimensions as a tourist, but it is also an educational place of modern history. Just as visiting the A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Ground Zero in New York and bomb site in Oslo.

Ferris wheel in Pripyat.

Nature had reclaimed the area and the silence was deafening.

Remains of a supermarket in Pripyat.

Abandoned building in Pripyat.