Pripyat was built concurrently with the Chernobyl power plant as a company town; it would house mostly the plant workers and their families. Today, it is the largest abandoned city in the Exclusion Zone, and the most visited by tourists. It is a rare sight to see an entire town slowly returning to nature and … Continue reading Welcome to Pripyat
There are certain landmarks which, whatever their original purpose may have been, now serve primarily as totems of identity and placehood. The Eiffel tower is Paris, just as the Statue of Liberty is New York, and a trip to either of these cities would be incomplete without seeing them. The Pripyat ferris wheel falls, for … Continue reading Our Eiffel Tower
The Exclusion Zone has an eeriness to it which is heightened by the giant power plant looming at its center. An already massive building housing four reactors was made even more so once the Sarcophagus was slid into place over it late in 2016. This gleaming new dome, at over three hundred feet tall, is … Continue reading The Chernobyl Reactors
Continuing the theme of the previous post, these are more photos from the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl featuring stunning overgrowth of the last three decades. This last rooftop shot really shows that “drowned’ quality of many of the buildings. Our guide had told us that winter can be a better time to visit, as … Continue reading Back Under
Abandoned places get overgrown; the town of Pripyat is no exception. But there is simply more here, a case where a quantitative difference leads to a qualitative one. When hundreds of square miles are left untended, the result is that these once-inhabited areas don’t just feel overgrown, they feel submerged. The place where I felt … Continue reading Submergence
I have, as of this writing, been doing urban exploration for a decade. I have traveled across the American rust belt and beyond specifically to photograph the old, the decayed, and the abandoned. I have also felt, in recent years, that I have been pursuing diminishing returns; after a while, each ruined building begins to … Continue reading Where Words Fail
There runs, under Kiev, a vast network of tunnels. Built over a century ago, they provide water drainage for this hilly city and thus protect against landslides. It isn’t entirely illegal to enter them, but neither is it quite legal. It is, as the guide intones before guiding you down through a manhole at the … Continue reading Subterranean Pastoral
Pecherska Lavra, or the monastery of the caves, sprawls across one Kiev’s many hills. Unfortunately, the day I was there, the caves were not open to tourists. The churches, however, made for great photos, until a stern lady shooed me and my camera out. In general, Orthodox churches are more photogenic than others. Catholics, too, … Continue reading The Monastery of the Caves
Three years ago, a wave of protests against a corrupt government washed across Ukraine. The epicenter of the movement was Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. (A good summation of those events can be found on Wikipedia.) When the dust had settled, the president had fled the country and pro-democracy activists had gained the upper … Continue reading The Maidan
For many Americans, any and all former Soviet republics get lumped into a nebulous mass of geographical uncertainty, authoritarianism, and Borat-type culture. Ukraine is a bracing tonic against these stereotypes; a nation whose rich culture belies its relatively brief geopolitical history. The region of what today is called Ukraine has been at a political and … Continue reading The Crossroads of Ukraine
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