40 years since the Chernobyl accident. A trip to the exclusion zone.

The fire that engulfed the reactor’s debris burned for nearly two weeks. All this time, invisible but deadly substances—uranium decay products, radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium, and plutonium—were released into the atmosphere. Winds spread this cloud over vast territories. Northern Ukraine, western Russia, and the entire eastern part of Belarus were particularly hard hit. Traces of Chernobyl fallout were later found even in Western Europe and Scandinavia.

The city of Pripyat was founded in 1970 for the builders and operators of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and was considered one of the most modern and well-appointed cities of the Soviet nuclear project. At the time of the accident, approximately 49,000 people lived here—young professionals with families. Schools, hospitals, the Energetik Palace of Culture, the Polesie Hotel, and the famous Ferris wheel at the amusement park, which was never launched, were all in operation. On the morning of April 27, 1986, 36 hours after the explosion, the population began to evacuate, giving residents about two hours to pack and allowing them to take only documents and a minimum of belongings. Today, Pripyat remains a ghost town within the 30-kilometer exclusion zone: all the buildings are abandoned and gradually crumbling, the streets are overgrown with dense forest, and abandoned belongings, toys, and photographs still lie in the apartments of former residents. Radiation levels in some parts of the city are still tens of times higher than background levels, although the most dangerous short-lived isotopes have already decayed, and short stays on organized excursions are considered relatively safe. Nature has completely taken over infrastructure: birds nest in the building of School No. 3, elk and wild boar live in the kindergartens, and the Ferris wheel has become a symbol of suspended time and a prime photographic location for tourists from all over the world.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s cooling pond, built to cool the reactors, remained a highly radioactive body of water after the accident, but it did not become lifeless. Contrary to fears, fish—catfish, pike, carp, perch, and other species—still inhabit its waters. Due to a long-standing ban on fishing and the lack of anthropogenic impact, some fish have reached abnormally large sizes, and their bodies contain elevated concentrations of cesium-137 and strontium-90. Nevertheless, the fish populations in the cooling pond remain stable, forming one of the most unusual radiation-biological reserves in the world.

For many kilometers around the “Alley of Dead Villages, ” there is an area where time stood still in April 1986: empty huts and houses stand with their doors wide open, their windows broken, and their roofs caved in. The courtyards are overgrown with dense bushes and young trees, and the roads between the villages, once paved, are now cracking from the roots. Nature is slowly but inexorably absorbing everything created by man: in some huts, birch trees are pushing through the floors, and elk and wild boar freely enter once-living rooms. Thus, the vanished villages become part of the forest, leaving behind only silent monuments and rare signs on the roadsides. In 2020, a major forest fire occurred in the exclusion zone, which destroyed the remains of 12 abandoned villages, including the same Kopachi, Lelev, and Poleskoye, which had stood untouched since the accident.