Tragedy Lingers Inside Chornobyl’s Abandoned City

Even looking down from a rooftop onto the overgrown ruins of Lenin Square, it’s difficult to comprehend the scale of loss in Prypiat, Ukraine. Perhaps, like me, you’ve been fascinated by the tragedy of Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukrainian, for decades.* Perhaps you know that Prypiat was an entire city of nearly 50,000 people, replete with all of the modern (at the time) amenities that a newly built Soviet mecca of science and research could provide. Prypiat had cultural centers, hotels, grocery stores, schools, cafes, and furniture stores like any city would. All of them were evacuated and left abandoned only seven short years after Prypiat was officially proclaimed a city in 1979.

Certainly you’re familiar with the reason: the catastrophic explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986. It released approximately 12 trillion international units of radioactivity—400 times the amount released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which then spread across the globe contaminating millions of acres of farms, forests, and towns. It remains both the worst nuclear disaster in history and also the costliest disaster ever.

There’s something about seeing what’s left in person that defies all preconceived notions or expectations. Even if you think you know what to expect, you don’t. Perhaps the most shocking realization, gazing across pocked asphalt and the crumbing concrete skeletons of the Hotel Polissya and the Palace of Culture Energetik, is also the most obvious. Good God, I recall thinking to myself, this really is an entire city.

When I was a child, I lived just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and my family evacuated during the partial meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Though nobody was killed during the accident and the average radiation dose surrounding residents received was less than they’d get from a chest X-ray, it was hard not to superimpose the devastation before me onto the neighborhoods and businesses I’d grown up with. Rather conveniently for the sake of comparison, Harrisburg’s population is also approximately 50,000, and Unit 2 was estimated to be less than half an hour from fully melting down. The entire time I was in Prypiat, I couldn’t shake the queasy awareness that this could be my home, and my understanding of the depth and scope of the calamity was woefully inadequate.

No matter how much one learns about the facts of a disaster, no matter how many photos or documentaries one may watch, standing in the epicenter of such an incalculable loss and feeling it in the depths of your heart simply can’t be conveyed. No matter how much you know about a thing, no matter what your experiences are, you’ll never fully grasp it because it is so much larger than you are. I’ve felt that in other places, but never as acutely as I did in Prypiat.

Misconceptions continue to flourish about Prypiat and the surrounding area. Perhaps the most common is the idea that the area affected by the Chornobyl disaster is a bleak, sickly wasteland. The caricature popularized by popular media is reminiscent of settings in the Fallout video game series: a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape consisting of dead trees and devoid of humans or animals, where one might easily receive a lethal dose of radiation (perhaps from a glowing pool of water) and perish. It is far from the truth, though.

Lush, beautiful forests and wetlands encircle Prypiat, and plants of all types are swallowing the city. If one was not aware of the dangers of radiation exposure beforehand, they would likely never guess that these particular woodlands posed any threat—a fact the Russian army discovered the hard way when they camped in the Red Forest. The Red Forest, or Rusty Forest, is named for the fact that it received one of the highest doses of radiation following the disaster, instantly killing all of the pine trees and turning them a rusty red. Those trees were cut down to prevent forest fires, and new ones have replaced them in the years since the disaster. During the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, troops without protective gear used the Red Forest as a route for convoys, hunted and fished for food there, and dug trenches in the contaminated soil. None of these are things you want to do in a highly radioactive area. The resulting radiation sickness is believed to have forced the troops to withdraw from that region.

While mutations and reduced lifespans are a reality for some wildlife in the area, the ubiquitous forests have proved to be a haven for a surprisingly diverse array of fauna. A 12-month study recorded images of large mammals that included badgers and beavers, elk and deer, bison, and even horses. Carnivores were recorded too—foxes, lynx, bears, and wolves. Amazingly, the wolf population is roughly seven times higher than in other comparable areas of Belarus.

Likewise, the exclusion zone is far from devoid of human life. I was surprised to learn that the remaining three reactors at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant remained in operation for years after the disaster. Unit 2 was shut down in 1991 after a turbine fire, Unit 1 was shut down in 1996, and Unit 3 went offline in 2000. The plant entered the decommissioning phase in 2015, a process that will take decades. As a result, arriving at the power plant looks much like visiting any other active power plant. Cars are parked in the parking lot, a cafeteria serves food to visitors and workers alike, and a train ferries personnel not staying in the zone to and from Slavutych.

Construction on Slavutych—the last city built by the USSR—began almost immediately after the Chornobyl incident, and it was intended to be a replacement for Prypiat. Prior to an exodus of over 5,000 inhabitants following Russian occupation in early 2022, the population of Slavutych was 24,464, primarily survivors of the Chornobyl disaster and staff who continued to work at the power plant. There are apartments, hotels, and convenience stores for those who still live and work in the exclusion zone. It certainly doesn’t compare to the amenities in the city before the explosion, but it also isn’t quite the ghost town some might imagine.

Though numbers have dropped significantly as a result of the Russian invasion, tourism was also a thriving industry in Prypiat prior to COVID-19. During my own visit, it was surreal to go from feeling utterly lost in a maze of decaying concrete edifices to seeing a tour bus pull up next and unload a gaggle of tourists taking selfies in front of the iconic Ferris wheel. Even upon entering Prypiat, one is greeted by a kiosk selling T-shirts featuring an edgy bear proclaiming the wearer has “survived the Zone.” There’s even Atomik vodka, which is made from “slightly contaminated” rye grown in the exclusion zone and water from the Chornobyl aquifer that fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your tastes) does not have detectable levels of radiation. My guide took most of it in stride (although he did mention that he felt a wedding proposal in the city was perhaps not in the best taste).

Regardless of one’s feelings about dark tourism—the term for travel centering around sites of death or suffering—there is an undeniable draw to witnessing the aftermath of the Chornobyl disaster firsthand. In 2019, a staggering 124,423 visitors did just that, and I was one of them. While I do feel that the commodification of the site as a tourist attraction cheapens it, particularly when guests or hosts lack appropriate respect, the economic impact on the region speaks for itself. It is, in my opinion, a tangible benefit to the residents.

Though the hazards in the region have changed dramatically since my visit in 2019, the perceived danger of radiation exposure is much different than the reality. Radiation exposure is determined by both amount and length of time and, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “exposure to low but unusual levels of radiation over a period of time is less dangerous than exposure to a huge amount at once.” Though the explosion released massive levels of radiation, there are many different types. Most decayed quickly, with the longest lasting traveling the furthest. Visitors are required to go through scanners that detect radioactive particles hitchhiking on their clothes several times throughout the day, and are forbidden from eating plants or animals in the exclusion zone, digging, traipsing through the woods, or taking souvenirs.

According to my dosimeter, after a four-day visit that included a visit to the wall of the original concrete sarcophagus enclosing the destroyed reactor, I had received less long-term radiation exposure than I did on the international flight to Ukraine. Prypiat and the surrounding area are not a place for improv—they require the careful direction of an experienced guide. Mine was Mykhailo Teslenko, an experienced guide who came on personal recommendation, and whose grandfather was a first responder to the disaster. Prior to the Russian war against Ukraine, the area could be navigated relatively safely with proper safeguards.

Prypiat isn’t estimated to be habitable again for 20,000 years. It’s a nearly unimaginable length of time that will see species come and go and civilizations rise and fall. Roughly 20,000 years ago, humanity was in the midst of the Upper Paleolithic era. It was during our most recent ice age; Europe and North America were covered under ice sheets about 2.5 miles thick, and megafauna including mammoths and saber-toothed cats still roamed the earth. It was in this general period that the first known humans migrated to North America.

Thousands of years after Prypiat’s concrete buildings have crumbled to dust, the contamination will remain as perhaps the most enduring testament to our own era—one of incredible scientific and technological advances that, without proper understanding and care, had consequences that stretched far beyond the limits of human comprehension. It is a story that must be witnessed and told again and again. I believe it will remain a place that people will visit, contemplate, and study long after the names of most people alive today have faded into obscurity. It’s possible that the tourists in busses taking selfies in front of Prypiat’s ruins know this on some primal level—after all, many travel selfies are a way to connect ourselves with experiencing something much larger than ourselves, of saying “I was here.” Even if we can’t understand the bitter reckoning the site represents, the soil will remember us for millennia.

For more photographs and the history of the Prypiat and Chornobyl, visit the gallery on Abandoned America or listen to an interview with guide Mykhailo Teslenko on the Abandoned America podcast.

*Prypiat and Chornobyl are better known by the Soviet spellings “Chernobyl” and “Pripyat.” That spelling is still technically correct, since they were under Soviet control at the time they were built, but I prefer to use the current Ukrainian spelling out of respect for their individuality and sovereignty.

Matthew Christopher is a writer and photographer who has explored abandoned locations across the globe for two decades, chronicling the lost landmarks in our midst. You can find more of his work on his website Abandoned America or listen to his Abandoned America podcast.