The Pripyat ferris wheel as seen from the
former Palace of Culture

Image courtesy of Keith Adams

Inside waiting for us is our guide, Youri, a former English teacher. He traded his teaching job for a position at Chernobylinterinform. “It’s three times the money, so I took it. I have a family. They rotate us out of here every few weeks just to be safe,” he says. We are sitting in the room where the Chernobyl trials were held in July 1987. The Soviet Supreme Court found the former director of the power plant, the chief engineer, and the engineer’s deputy guilty and imprisoned them for 10 years each. At the front of the former courtroom, Youri shows us the dosimeter (radiation detector) he will carry so he can measure radiation levels as we travel around. While we drive to Pripyat the organizers replay the evacuation scene, and everyone falls quiet.

Youri leads us through the city streets, miles and miles of nothingness. No cars, no human life, just paved roads waiting for no one. We stop at Pripyat’s former cultural center and enter a theater. A bright red-and-blue mural high on a wall is the only thing intact. It is a classic Soviet painting of large sheaves of wheat, women holding baskets filled with food, and men working as farmers. Everyone looks happy. Upstairs there are hundreds of books strewn from one end of the floor, spilling over into the other rooms.

Christophe and I follow another couple to a school building. Outside there are letters and numbers etched into the facade. Inside there are wide windowed classrooms aglow with sunlight, a tumble of overturned chairs and desks. And then on a table lies a perfect arrangement of teachers’ notebooks, attendance records, and grades for students, all written in Cyrillic. How did this survive—or has some intruder rearranged it?


The entire city of Pripyat is a grave, a place that died more than 20 years ago and will never come back to life.

Youri enters the school and checks for radiation. He holds the dosimeter near the chairs and desks. Everywhere he goes it clicks off the sound of radiation: in the classrooms, in the theater, in the music room, near the piano keys, in apartments, along the ground. No place has escaped. The levels vary, sometimes near 100 ­micro-roentgens per hour but not much higher. Background radiation levels in New York City are around 12. A level of 100 is not considered dangerous for short periods. “It’s safe for you to walk around,” Youri concludes.

Christophe wants to walk over to the town swimming pool, a place he visited on his last trip. Dmitri comes to warn us away. “There’s a plutonium spot around the swimming pool. Don’t go closer,” he says. Plutonium spot? How does he know? And are we really as safe as we thought? When some murky yellowish liquid drips from a ceiling in one of the buildings onto Christophe’s head, he takes a photo of it to document the event. “This stuff fell on my head,” he says. “Do you think I’ll be OK?”

Down a long, quiet road overgrown with tall brown grasses, we see a tiny dun horse trotting away and wonder if it’s real. “Yes, that was a horse you saw,” Youri reassures us. “They were introduced here several years ago to see how they would survive. For some reason the radiation doesn’t seem to affect them. Scientists are studying them.”

At lunchtime, while Christophe and I eat our snack of Ukrainian pork fat, black bread, and red caviar, the organizers hand us blue garbage bags. “Stage one is beginning,” Dmitri says. “As part of our remembrance day, we wanted to clean up our hometown. Thank you for helping us.” If that goes well, he plans to move on to stage two, making Pripyat a living museum, a tribute to its far-flung exiles. ?

We spread out on the wide, open streets picking up debris, mostly empty vodka bottles. “If anything is in the mossy area, don’t pick it up. Radiation accumulates in moss. It could be dangerous,” Youri tells us.

Alex, from our tour group, motions to Christophe and me to follow him. He attempts to speak, but when he can’t find the English words he motions with his hand. “My English bad,” he says. “Come.” We follow him through a brambly path, overgrown with tall bushes and prickly branches. He winds his way quickly until he reaches an apartment building, the entranceway crumbling, with peeling paint and broken windows. “Me,” he says. He touches his chest, smiles and points to the top of the building, counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. “My home,” he says.