Pripyat Isn't Scary Either!

Pripyat — an abandoned city in Kyiv Oblast, in northern Ukraine near the border with Belarus, also known as the Ghost City. So says Wikipedia. Being there, I didn't feel at all that it was a ghost city. You get bigger shivers being in Kłomino.

There's a lot you can say about myths, monsters and radiation, especially when you want to scare someone. According to what the guide and the guards said, in Pripyat there are no animals, no birds, no life. If you see a bird in some photo then… someone painted it in.

Pripyat really is a big city. After all, around 50,000 inhabitants lived there. When you start touring the city, I recommend heading up one of the sixteen-storey towers.

I chose the famous building called Fujiyama. It stands on the edge of the city, so it gives you a beautiful view over the whole of Pripyat. There's also a good chance that, climbing onto the roof of this building, you'll be alone, since most tour groups stick to the city centre.

Standing on the roof of this tower block, you can easily make out the Moscow Eye. Huge antennas towering above the forest. You can also see them very well driving along the road from the reactor to Pripyat.

Touring Pripyat in summer is rather troublesome. Most of the roads and approaches to the buildings are overgrown with lush greenery, guarded by countless hordes of mosquitoes, flies and spiders. There are a great many bugs there, which is why I'm planning my next trip for autumn or winter instead.

Pushing your way through the bushes, it's worth heading off to the outskirts of the city. Entering the buildings there, you have a better chance of reaching rooms that haven't yet been trampled and looted. You won't find beer cans there, or condoms (could the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. crowd be having sex there?) and other traces of thrill-hungry tourists.

Among the more interesting places worth visiting are: the post office, the cinema, the school and the swimming pool. That last spot makes a really huge impression, especially when you stand up high on the diving board.

The most interesting thing in Pripyat is the props left behind by artists and journalists who wanted to give the place more drama. Let's add something of our own to make Pripyat gloomier!

And so you can come across various terrifying paintings on the buildings, artistically arranged masks, children's toys and the like. In the apartments you'll find heaps of masks piled up. Why are there dozens of masks piled into a heap in an apartment?

The most interesting are the stacks of books and papers you can find in the buildings in the city centre. You'll find quite a lot of books scattered along the corridors. Beautifully arranged, most of them open.

If you look at them closely, you can notice that most of them date from 1993. Tonnes of papers, posters… they're too new.

Walking around the city, you'll sometimes come across symbols like these. They warn of increased radiation in that spot. Curious, because the counter showed nothing of the sort. If anyone is after thrills and rapidly rising numbers on the counter, I recommend heading to the Jupiter factory. But even there it's not all that dangerous.

Setting off for Ukraine, to Chernobyl and Pripyat, I imagined evacuated lands, abandoned roads and an absence of people for many kilometres around. Fanatics of the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. talked of mutants and creatures. The reality, however, is completely different.

If we're lucky, we won't meet a single person. If we're unlucky, all sorts of people with cameras will keep wandering into our shots. By the power plant we'll meet workers playing cards and smoking cigarettes. In Pripyat we may run into one of the many tour groups. No wonder, at the sight of 4 coaches with tourists piling out, cameras in hand. Pripyat is alive and doing well!