Exploring Pripyat – The Ghost City of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone
UPDATE: Can you visit Chernobyl in 2025? No. As of March 2023, Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone and Pripyat is closed to visitors, due to the ongoing war between the Ukraine and Russia.
Haunting in its emptiness, Pripyat is a true symbol of the effects caused by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
A whole city abandoned, once a thriving urban centre for life, now belonging to nature and the elements. Tenement blocks left empty, playgrounds overgrown with bushes, and derelict public buildings with glassless windows.
It’s hard to believe this ghost city was once home to around 50,000 residents. As my feet crunch on gravel and leaves, I imagine the lives once lived here. Originally founded in 1970, and given city status in 1979, Pripyat was created to serve the nearby Chernobyl Power Plant, housing its workers and their families.
The residents of Pripyat were young (the average age being 26), with good jobs and affluent salaries. 20 kindergartens and schools taught almost 12,000 children. All the spaces you’d expect from any city – gyms, parks, shops and restaurants.
The mass evacuation of Pripyat took place on April 27th, the day after Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Power Plant exploded. At 11am, buses arrived in the city and the evacuation began at around 2pm. Residents were told to bring only essential items, as they only expected to be away from the city for around three days. They never returned to their lives and homes in Pripyat.
Although no one has lived in Pripyat since the evacuation, anything of value left behind has since been taken. One of the places this is most prominent is the former supermarket in the centre of the city, where shelves lie in disarray across the floor. A handful of shopping carts, rusted furniture and signage are all that remain to indicate its former use.
The abandoned city is protected by security, but that doesn’t stop some people from entering regardless. ‘Stalkers’ are visitors who take a more radical approach to visiting Pripyat – urban explorers who venture inside the building.
From time to time, pieces of art pop up on the walls. Some are commissioned and agreed with the authorities, however others have seemingly popped up overnight, with the artists unknown.
Like many large cities, Pripyat had its own football team, and Avanhard Stadium was the home of FC Stroitel Pripyat.
In 1985, the team finished high in their division, with hopes of promotion in the Soviet football leagues in the coming year. After the disaster, no team would ever play at Avanhard Stadium again. Now, trees grow where football games used to take place, and only a section of the stands remains.
With a ferris wheel that’s an icon of Chernobyl imagery, Pripyat’s amusement park was all set to open on May 1st 1986. Alongside the ferris wheel, dodgems and swinging rides awaited excited families.
It’s reported that the park actually opened early, on the morning of 27th April, it’s one and only day of operation before residents were swiftly evacuated. To this day, the rides still stand – dodgems left as if they’d been abandoned mid-ride, and the ferris wheel still towering precariously. Prey to the elements, a feeling that it might succumb to rust and fall any second anchors the sobering feeling as you stand on the tarmac, looking up at its somehow still vibrant yellow carriages.
Perched on the edge of the lake, Café Pripyat was once a place for the city’s residents to gather and socialise, with floor to ceiling stained glass windows. In the summer months, young locals would sit and drink on the café’s terrace, or head out onto the lake on sailboats.
Pripyat’s hospital building had the capacity for 410 patients, as well as extra clinics. Medical equipment and patient records were all left behind after the evacuation.
The basement of the hospital is perhaps one of the more radioactive sites in the area – the few who break the rules to enter have found the suits of the emergency responders who attended the site of the disaster. After urban explorers continued to visit the basement, authorities have since attempted to close up entrances with sand.
Visiting Pripyat was an eye-opening, incredibly surreal experience. Although we’d visited the Chernobyl Power Plant on the trip, and stopped by the buried village of Kopachi, it was in Pripyat that I really felt the haunting desolation caused by the nuclear disaster.
Imagining some 50,000 people having their daily life interrupted so abruptly felt incredibly real while walking Pripyat’s overgrown pathways. The remnants of what the residents left behind are chilling, painting pictures of simple, everyday existence before thousands of lives were changed forever…
Read more: Chernobyl’s Kopachi Kindergarten
