A Wheel Of Life In Chernobyl’s Ghost Town

by Catherine O'Hare (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find Ukraine

“No, they probably won’t confiscate your shoes. That only happens with some of our more curious visitors…”. Yaroslav, our Chernobyl Exclusion Zone tour guide, was attempting to alleviate my fears about the military-controlled contamination checkpoints whilst simultaneously re-calibrating the Geiger counter attached to my belt. Its shrill alarm warning of potentially dangerous radiation levels kept drowning him out with irritating regularity unless he reset the device to recognise increasing base levels as ‘normal’. None of this was reassuring. Not least since we had already been told not to place anything but our feet directly on the ground and to keep our arms and legs covered at all times. Those tourists who had turned up in the 28-degree heat of the Ukrainian late summer in shorts and t-shirts had been offered flimsy impersonations of hazmat suits which many, nonetheless, just casually draped around their waists. Still, we wandered cautiously through the, once grand, streets of Pripyat; the town purpose-built to serve the workers of the nearby doomed Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It had been a Soviet dream to live here, we were told. Waiting lists for apartments were years long. It had the best schools, shops, stadiums, facilities and an average age of just 26 years old. Now imposing red pines and formidable silver birches wound their way through crumbling tower blocks, chipping away at concrete creations. Peeling propaganda posters featuring Lenin implored us to “Learn! Learn! Learn!” as we carefully picked our way through the rubble. Away from the screaming Geiger counters the silence was eerie. A town free from the constant background humming of electric fridges, TVs, lights. The only sound was the gentle rustling of leaves as if nature were whispering about how it had won a war mankind had lost here. Slowly, the little proofs of life almost mockingly fell in front of our faces from the great pines as the constant crunch of broken glass felt like snow under our feet. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a clearing, and there it was. The pièce de résistance of so-called ‘dark tourism’: the iconic Pripyat Ferris wheel; long seen as a symbol of apocalyptic abandonment. Recently, urban explorers known locally as ‘stalkers’ had sneaked into the zone illegally, past the guards, and removed the wheel’s locking mechanism with a view to shooting a daring new video for their popular YouTube channel. Now at the mercy of the breeze, the neglected structure ominously creaked and groaned as it dragged its empty, rusting, yellow buckets around and around in a sad imitation of its glory days. “Yeah, that’s not supposed to move” Yaroslav says, although, standing in this bleak post-human landscape it’s somehow satisfyingly evocative that it does. Once the authorities get wind of it they’ll lock it down so that it’s frozen in time once again. Well, at least it’ll match the rest of Pripyat.