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Archive for the ‘Pripyat’ Category

Zone Of Alienation – Pripyat: Supermarket

Posted in Abandoned, Europe, Map, Pripyat, Supermarket, Ukraine, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Zone Of Alienation on 2011/01/23| 2 Comments »

During our visit to the Zone Of Alienation our guide Maxim asked us several times if there is anything specific we really want to see. After we’ve seen the standard attractions Palace of Culture and the Amusement Park I actually wanted to get an overview of the city and since there are so many well-known pictures people standing on top of buildings I asked Maxim if we could do that, too. Of course officially it is way too dangerous and therefore forbidden, but after a well-timed pause of like 10 seconds, part of the program as the information we got about every location, Maxim told us that he knows a building where we might be able to “risk it”. But first he wanted to show us the supermarket on the way to the car.
Since Pripyat was a city built to house the personnel working at the nearby nuclear power plant a lot of highly educated and well-payed people lived in the town – Pripyat was a privileged city in many, many ways. Maxim illustrated that by mentioning that the supermarket in Pripyat was one of the few places in the Soviet Union that actually sold Chanel Nº 5. In times when every one hit wonder teeny idol sells half a dozen perfumes as merchandising the Chanel thing might not seem to be a big deal, but given the political situation back in 1986 it is actually the perfect example of how high the standard of living in Pripyat really was.
Nowadays the central supermarket, which was part of a small shopping mall, is quite a sad view, but in 1986 it must have been state of the art with a reputation that good that people from the surrounding area took long trips to shop there. The ground floor was mainly for food and the huge freezer cabinets with their isolation containers cracked open made the place look rather creepy. The entire floor was in disarray with shopping carts, shelves and a bunch of broken furniture scattered all over the ground – pretty much the only things unharmed were the signs showing where the aisles once were.
The first floor, reserved for non-food items, was in even worse shape. With all the shelves gone and the ceiling cladding, including all the lamps, crashed to the ground the whole floor made the impression as if it could collapse at any time – that feeling was boosted by the fact that the ceiling remains were softened over the past two decades by the forces of nature; even walking there gave me the creeps. The view across Pripyat’s Lenin Square to the city’s most famous hotel “Polissya” was nice though…
(If you would like to know more about my trip to the Zone Of Alienation please *click here* to get to the “Chernobyl & Pripyat” special. For a map of the area please *click here*.)

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Zone Of Alienation – Pripyat: Amusement Park

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Europe, Map, Pripyat, Ukraine, Urbex, Video, Visited in 2010, Zone Of Alienation on 2011/01/16| 20 Comments »

Did you ever wonder why the famous Pripyat amusement park is almost always about the ferris wheel? Well, the answer is simple: There is not a lot more to see.
The amusement park actually barely deserves that title, since it wasn’t a Disneyland or Universal Studios type of theme park, but more like a travelling, temporary kind of old-style amusement park. It was set up in celebration of May Day 1986, but the tragedy happening on April 26th was cause for a change of plans: The park was opened for one day to distract people from what was happening only a few kilometers away at the nuclear power plant. When the city of Pripyat was abandoned on April 27th so was the amusement park. (This is a fact widely unknown – most sources state that the park was never opened, but there are pictures in existence showing people standing in line in front of the rides.)
Now the (actually not so big, but nevertheless beautiful) ferris wheels rusts away next to a small and simple merry-go-round, a boat swing and a bumper car – hard to imagine that this small collection of rides was once considered an attraction for 50,000 people…
Another fact people usually don’t know about the amusement park: It’s one of the most contaminated areas in Pripyat. Parts of it are perfectly clean, but others are still highly radioactive. While the concrete parts are mostly safe nowadays, the surrounding moss can be as high as 25 µSv/h (microsievert per hour) – the radioactive particles were simply washed into the soil. Walking across such a spot like that won’t harm you instantly, but you don’t wanna build a house there as it is about 400 times the normal terrestrial radiation…
The amusement park is one of the standard locations included in pretty much every Pripyat tour – especially since it gained massive popularity after it was rebuilt in video games like “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” and “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”.
Before you start looking at the pictures below I hope you will enjoy an Abandoned Kansai first: I uploaded a short video of about 75 seconds to Youtube. Unedited, 720p. I hope it’s a worthy addition to this article…
(If you would like to know more about my trip to the Zone Of Alienation please *click here* to get to the “Chernobyl & Pripyat” special. For a map of the area please *click here*. If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* and *follow this blog on Twitter* – and of course there is the *video channel on Youtube*…)

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Zone Of Alienation – Pripyat: The Palace Of Culture “Energetik”

Posted in Abandoned, Europe, Map, Museum, Pripyat, School, Spa / Onsen, Sports, Ukraine, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Zone Of Alienation on 2011/01/12| 2 Comments »

The Palace of Culture was a typical institution of the Eastern bloc. The huge buildings were the meeting point for people to enjoy all kinds of recreational activities like sports and arts – and of course they were used for political indoctrination. The PoC usually included a cinema (some of them with several screens), a concert hall, dance studios, a swimming pool, study halls, a boxing ring, rooms with a variety of instruments, an area with tools for all kinds of do-it-yourself stuff and many, many more things – and of course Pripyat had a Palace of Culture, too, being one of more than 137,000 in the Soviet Union in 1988…
Energetik, the local Palace of Culture, was located directly at Pripyat’s center square, Lenin Square, and nowadays is one of the most visited locations in the world’s most famous abandoned city. One reason is that Energetik is on the way to everybody’s favorite Pripyat motive, the amusement park’s ferris wheel – the other is that the building offers a lot of variety on a relatively small space. Crossing Lenin Square Maxim was raving about how beautiful the place must have been 30 ago, given that the huge open space once was the home of a good part of the previously mentioned 33,000 rose plants.
I, on the other hand, was just fascinated by the unique, sad beauty that makes Pripyat what it is today. Struck by awe I entered the Palace of Culture and didn’t even know where to start taking pictures. Anywhere else in the world exploring this building would have taken at least half a day, but I somehow had the feeling that I would have that much time – in the end I had about 50 minutes…
Pripyat’s Palace of Culture is actually in pretty bad shape. Like most other buildings in the zone there isn’t a single window still intact, so the forces of nature – up to 40 degrees Celsius in summer, down to minus 20 in winter – did quite some damage in the past; and having tourists visiting the place every other day doesn’t help much either I guess. Most of the rooms were severely vandalized (a long time ago though!), the cinema barely recognizable. Bushes and little trees were growing inside of some rooms and many of the mural paintings were crumbling away…
Exploring the different kinds of rooms was an amazing experience, but one moment stuck with me in a special way. It happened when I walked through a hallway towards what I assumed was the main gymnasium in the building. As I entered the huge room I looked outside the gigantic front of window frames and saw the famous ferris wheel 100 meters away in the background. Unexpected and absolutely mind-blowing… still gives me goose-bumps when I think back now.
Sadly only a couple of minutes later Maxim made us hurry-up for the first time – the amusement park was waiting just for us…
(If you would like to know more about my trip to the Zone Of Alienation please *click here* to get to the “Chernobyl & Pripyat” special. For a map of the area please *click here*.)

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Zone Of Alienation – The Red Forest / Pripyat In General

Posted in Abandoned, Europe, Map, Pripyat, Ukraine, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Zone Of Alienation on 2011/01/09| 5 Comments »

When people talk about the ruins of the Zone Of Alienation they usually say Chernobyl, but mean in fact Pripyat. As I already described, Chernobyl appears to be a rather normal countryside town, except for the fact that it’s populated just temporarily by its inhabitants.
The real ghost town in the area is called Pripyat, named after the local river that provided the nearby nuclear power plan with water. Founded in 1970 it was planned and built with the purpose of housing the people working at the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, now known as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Prior to the disaster it was the home to almost 50,000 people with an average age of just 26 years in more than 13,400 apartments in 160 buildings. The city had 15 primary schools, 5 secondary schools and 1 professional school, a hospital for 410 patients, 25 stores, 27 eateries, 10 gyms, 3 indoor swimming-pools , 2 stadiums and 35 playgrounds. At that time Pripyat was famous for its 33,000 rose plants and almost 250,000 shrubs – a green paradise about 100km north of Kiev. It was a city for privileged people with high incomes; the local police station nevertheless looks scary to this very day…
While the town of Chernobyl benefited from the east wind on the time of the disaster Pripyat got hit directly. To get to Pripyat you have to pass a bridge across train tracks, now called the “Bridge of Death” – a couple of children watched the spectacular lights during the accident standing on the bridge while the wind blew the radiation in their direction; they were amongst the first people to die… It nevertheless took authorities 36 hours to start the evacuation of Pripyat. To speed it up they told the population they should bring only necessary things as they would be back after three days – Pripyat is a ghost town ever since.
Nowadays, after almost 25 years (the anniversary of the disaster will be in April) it is relatively safe to enter Pripyat. Since the isotopes released during the accident were rather short-lived (and due to the work of 800,000 so-called “liquidators”) the radition in Pripyat barely ever exceeds one microsievert per hour – one exception would be the basement of the hospital were were strongly advised not to enter. Aside from natural decay the already mentioned liquidators were the main cause of destruction / vandalism in Pripyat. When new buildings in the not so severely contaminated Chernobyl were constructed, the planners weren’t able to provide enough furniture, so the liquidators took it from Pripyat since it wasn’t needed there anymore. So while most buildings in Pripyat are still standing a lot of them are actually quite empty, some vandalised by frustrated workers – other than that you can find a couple of graffiti all over the town, done by a French guy a couple of years ago. Other than that it’s 25 years of natural decay…
On our 15 minute ride from Chernobyl to Pripyat Maxim, the guide, asked us what we wanted to see first and since we had no specific plans we asked for a “Best Of” tour with spontaneous adjustments once in a while. We made a quick stop at the Pripyat City Sign right outside of the city where we could also have a look at some trees that died from the intense radiation at the time of the disaster (the so-calld Red Forest) – right next to them an abandoned building of the forest authority.
Pripyat itself, fenced off and guarded by another post who, once more, checked our permission papers, is pretty much reclaimed by nature. The streets are free since there are almost daily tours to the city, but they are in horrible condition – no road builders in Pripyat for 25 years… Most buildings are completely surrounded by trees and bushes, some of them are not even visible anymore from the streets.
The atmosphere in Pripyat is truly unique – very quiet, very sad, you can almost hear your own thoughts. Since we had our private guide and driver we were able to visit places to our liking. Luckily Maxim was a very relaxed guy who gave us enough freedom to roam; actually I spent at least half of the time by myself, although Maxim was always in sight or at least in calling distance. From an urban exploration perspective Pripyat is the ultimate location. In every other place of the world each building would be a one day exploration on its own. But Pripyat is so much more. It’s not just abandoned buildings, it’s history. It’s not an investor running out of money, it’s not a movie set – it’s the real thing. Catastrophic events happened there 25 years ago and pretty much everybody, even unborn at the time, knows what you are talking about when you mention “Chernobyl”…
Okay, this was the last wordy posting with few pictures about the Zone Of Alienation. From now on it’ll be all about the locations I’ve visited during the two days in the zone, in the same order I’ve actually visited them – with lots of spectacular photos.
(If you would like to know more about my trip to the Zone Of Alienation please *click here* to get to the “Chernobyl & Pripyat” special. For a map of the area please *click here*.)

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Location Teaser 2

Posted in Abandoned, Amusement Park, Asia, Chūbu, Europe, Factory, Gifu, Haikyo, Hospital, Hotel / Ryokan, House, Hyogo, Japan, Kansai, Luxembourg, Map, Nara, Pripyat, Ukraine, Urbex, Visited in 2010, Zone Of Alienation on 2010/09/28| 4 Comments »

Looking at my urban exploration log I realized that I had a pretty good run lately.

It all started when I met Michael of Gakuranman fame in late July – he was in Kansai and suggested to take on the famous Maya Hotel together. Since I already scouted the surrounding, but never went in, it was a fun exploration of an impressive location; followed by a revisit of the Takada Ranch Ruin. Two weeks later I started my summer vacation to Europe which included a side trip to the Zone of Alienation with its famous cities Chernobyl and Pripyat. Back to Germany I went to Luxembourg for two more explorations with a kindergarden friend of mine.

Soon after I got back to Japan I received an e-mail from Michael John Grist who planned to come to Kansai to tackle my haikyo nemesis, Nara Dreamland. I wanted to meet the guy more than I wanted to avoid the Dreamland, so we went there on a warm late summer night and for the first time I got in and out without spotting security… And finally I went on a little trip myself again to visit the Gakuranman in the Nagoya area to take pictures of the mysterious Doctor’s Shack, one of the few haikyo that are kept a real secret in Japan – even if it appears somewhere on the net or in a book there are barely any hints about its location and I’m really grateful Michael took me there; another awesome exploration, punished with about 30 mosquito bites!

Maya Hotel, Pripyat, Luxembourg, Nara Dreamland and the Doctor’s Shack in a row… it’s hard to do better than that! Now it’s time to write up the stories and show you some really, really interesting pictures!

(You can find all the articles related to Chernobyl and Pripyat by *clicking here* – the picture was taken *here*.)

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