Lost Places - Chornobyl Zone

About two years ago to Sasha Sirota, the permanent helmsman of public organization and the site with the same name pripyat.com, were come to mind a remarkable idea: to photograph in Pripyat the thrown apartments, at the desire of their former owners. Pripayters have approved the idea and... In some weeks they have filled up a forum of above-mentioned site with the demands. And as demands every day became more and more, and possibilities to realize them within the limits of planned trips ever less, it has been decided to arrange "the massed appartments photo-landing" to Pripyat, and also, whenever possible, to eliminate blanks in an address book and in an interactive map of the city.

"Troops landed" staff (from pripyat.com): Sasha (planca) Sirota, Anja (Alpha) Gorelysheva, Ivan (Ulis) Tsepaev, Yevgen (KRANZ) Goncharenko. Denis (Yangwy) Vishnevsky - the Ecocenter, Jura (tatarchuk) Tatarchuk - Chernobyl Inter Inform.

Frosty sunny morning on January, 5th, 2009. We are unloaded from the bus in the centre of Pripyat, we arm with maps, lists of addresses, we break into couples and we disperse on microdistricts. To us with Sasha the southeast part of a city (the first microdistrict) has dropped out.

• A Road Fairy Tale

We go out on Kurchatov street and we move in direction of MSCh-126 (it was possible to pass by court yards, but we could not refuse to ourselves pleasure to walk on beautiful snow-covered streets).

 

 

Near MSCh-126 we turn off on Druzhby Narodiv (Friendship of the People) and we go to the street beginning. Our first address: the house №5 (long five-storey building behind department store). Excellent possibility to photograph also the department store, hidden in the summer by dense natural growth.

• A Musical-Household Fairy Tale

Through a hostel court yard we make the way on street of Enthusiasts and we come into a hostel №7 of the Managements of building of ChNPP. Especially I liked "a room for rest".

• A Mysterious-Militian Fairy Tale

We are turned off for a corner of the seventh hostel and we passed along one more hostel (because of absence of the tablet, its number and remained for us a secret). We pass in a courtyard "Spetsprachechnaya" (special wash-house). Object working, mysterious and enigmatic. With a regularity of times in a month there are hearings about its definitive and irrevocable closing... But, judging by a smoke from a pipe, these hearings are obviously exaggerated. Attempts to find out for whom and what exactly indefatigably laundering the given object, lead up to a blind alley. The Zone administration nods on ChNPP, ChNPP in it's turn, sends to Zone Administration.

I could not keep and had photographed the most proof the militiaman of Pripayt. In the summer his foot badly visible because of a high grass, and it appears, it has a magnificent dark blue trousers! And what the stripes on them! And these guys (the photo on the right) are absolutely not visible in a grass in the summer.

• A Sad Fairy Tale

Opposite "Spetsprachechnaya" (special wash-house) - a hockey box. Sasha has pulled on children's memoirs: "How we were afraid to play here in the evening! Directly near a cemetery!" I am puzzled. A cemetery? Where? How many times I went here in the summer, I did not see any cemetery. "Yes here, directly behind a hockey box!" - Sasha, as a pointer, poke in a thicket with a camera tripod. An old cemetery of the village Semihody, has appeared almost in city centre.

Judging by dates on crosses, a cemetery has thrown in the sixties of the last century. Territory of a cemetery after failure did not deactivate so a gamma background in its territory, despite of 30 centimeters layer of snow, does not fall more low then 500 mcR/h.