“Residents were given two hours to gather their belongings. The evacuation of Pripyat’s 43,000 residents took 3.5 hours, using 1,200 buses from Kiev. Residents remember that everyone was in a hurry, but nobody was panicking. The residents of Pripyat were asked to carry with them only what was required for two or three days, some … Continue reading Get Out
Whatever you may think of meditation, you might be surprised to know that almost everyone does some form of it at some point in their life. It may bring up images of yogis sitting crosslegged on mountaintops, but all meditation is, in essence, is bringing a calm but steady focus and concentration to a task. … Continue reading Reverie in Blue
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
Within the Exclusion Zone, at the end of a long, rough road through dense forest, lies a curious relic of the cold war. Tucked away in this bit of wilderness, the Duga radar installation would have been a military secret, but for one thing: the staccato clicking noises it produced on shortwave radio frequencies. Shortwave … Continue reading The Russian Woodpecker
The Yaniv train station outside Pripyat isn’t very impressive. If you follow some rails into the woods, however, you’ll soon be greeted by the sight of railcars and locomotives rusting away among the pines. Since some of them are quite radioactive, they were allegedly derailed intentionally in order to permanently strand them in the Exclusion … Continue reading Of Rust and Rail
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
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
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