Pripyat and the Chernobyl zone

A woman stood on her balcony in this city and watched the reactor explode.

Pripyat is in Kyiv Oblast in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus, and it takes its name from the river beside it. It was founded on 4 February 1970 to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which stands north of the older town of Chernobyl that gave the plant its name. Pripyat was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 and had grown to a population of 49,360.

It was evacuated on 27 April 1986, one day after the disaster, and it has been empty since. The entire population was moved to Slavutych, a city built specifically to receive them. Pripyat lies in Vyshhorod Raion but the abandoned municipality is administered directly rather than locally.

The first-hand account worth reading belongs to the poet Lyubov Sirota, who lived here. Washington State University hosts a page on her Chernobyl Poems recording that she woke in the middle of that night, went out onto her balcony, and watched the Chernobyl reactor explode in front of her. In the days that followed she and her son grew gravely ill from heavy doses of radiation. She called what was left the dead city.

That is the frame this place deserves. Nearly fifty thousand people lived ordinary lives here until a Saturday morning, and many of them are still alive and still ill.

Access to the exclusion zone is controlled and conditions change with the wider situation in Ukraine. Check the current position before assuming anything is visitable.