This is the last of four posts about my time in The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In this post, I’m going to focus on a few villages in The Zone.
None of my Exclusion Zone posts need to be read in chronological order, but you may want to read the intro in my first post. In it, I talk about my thoughts on posting about this subject.
CHERNOBYL TOWN
Did you know that there’s a village called Chernobyl? It’s not just the name of the reactor complex. These days, workers in The Zone live here, though there are strict rules about how much time one can stay in the village of Chernobyl, due to radiation exposure.
Chernobyl is the home of one of the last remaining Lenin statues in Ukraine. It’s also the location of the trial for the workers accused of causing the Chernobyl accident.
The village of Chernobyl is occupied, but there are also quite a few abandoned buildings.
KRASNE
I was able to visit Krasne (and Masheve, coming up) in 2019, To be honest, when my guide announce that we’d be visiting two villages and that it would take the entire day…well I was not looking forward to it. But this turned out to be one of my favorite days of the tour.
Krasne is an abandoned village about an hour away from Pripyat. I’m not sure how long it would take to get there if the roads were better. The big draw of Krasne is their church, which is still in use. I’m not typically a fan of churches, but the care that has gone into keeping this one open is very impressive.
The day that we visited was cloudy and foggy. It made me feel like I was walking around in a real-life instance of Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
MASHEVE
The second village that we visited was so close to the Ukrainian border with Belarus that my guide (probably joking a little) warned us to not walk too far as to not illegally cross the border. I’m not really sure of what was all in Masheve because all of my attention was taken by the post-secondary school. OMG, what a treasure trove! Now that Pripyat is being locked down, more tourists are going to Masheve. In time, things will be stolen or moved but for now, it’s still relatively untouched.
From the books and posters left over, it looks like students learned about mechanical engineering, advanced math and foreign languages in this school.
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you. This is the end of my Chernobyl Exclusion Zone posts, for now. Once travel is safe again, this might just be the first place I go.