From the first moment that you set
foot in a town like Pripyat, you feel a certain reverence, as if
you've trespassed into both a sepulcher and a sanctuary. The
abandoned city sits near the northernmost border of Ukraine and
is a stark monument to the disastrous potential of mishandled
nuclear technology. Residents evacuated the city almost 25 years
ago when a catastrophic failure of the nearby Chernobyl reactor
led to regional contamination by radioactive fallout, and the
town has since been relinquished to vandals, nature, and ghosts.
One of the first things that you notice when you arrive is that
there's no background noise in Pripyat - no sound of traffic on
a distant highway, no industrial din rumbling just below your
threshold of perception, and even, strikingly, a notable lack of
birdsongs. You hear these noises every day, especially if you're
living in a city; you filter them out, ignoring them as
negligible and unimportant. The absence of all of these sounds
forces you to consider in one of those
can't-put-your-finger-on-it sort of ways that something here is
alien, and that things are not as they should be.
Of course, the entire town is crumbling in on itself as the
nearby forests creep back in from the edges of the city. The
years of neglect, the harsh winters, the warm summers, they've
all contributed to the erosion of man's footprint. It's
difficult to walk without stepping on the shattered parts of
buildings and it seems that not a single window remains
unbroken. Complexes of steel and concrete, once new and modern,
stand like tombstones waiting to be documented and photographed
so that they may serve as a message to posterity - This could
happen to your town, too.
There's a small amusement park erected in a courtyard near the
center of town. A rusting Ferris Wheel stands over a fenced
platform where motionless, decrepit bumper cars sit unused,
collecting rainwater or snow, depending on the season. The old
canvas tent that was intended to provide shade for riders on the
merry-go-round is now rotted away by time and the elements and
hangs down from feeble arches in mildewed and mossy strips. No
one ever used the attractions because the park was completed
just days before the evacuation of Pripyat.
You can take in a view of the whole city from the roof of one of
the higher buildings. The failed Chernobyl reactor stands a mere
two kilometers away from town square, though you can probably
see all the way to Belarus on a clear day. The only pollution in
the air is invisible, but radiation levels are low enough that
short trips are permitted with appropriate documentation and
planning. There's a 60 kilometer exclusion zone around Pripyat
and government permission is required if you want to travel
inside of this zone, but it's relatively uncomplicated and
affordable to do so.
Perhaps it's because the city itself is so much larger than you
may have experienced when you've traveled to other abandoned
places (it once was home for almost 50,000 people) and therefore
has more impact on you emotionally, but it seems that the old
city center, the school library, the apartment complex, and the
nursery are all connected by a somber lack of what once was -
community, a home. People lived here, they worked here, they had
loves and they had families. They had children here. Without the
community present, the town truly is just a shell, a skeleton, a
husk, abandoned. You've arrived in civilization's cemetery, a
three dimensional glimpse into a future without us. The relic
looks you in the eyes, solemnly, forcing you to reflect on the
impermanence of everything you know, patient in the knowledge
that you will leave this place with both something more and
something less than you had when you arrived.