Pripyat is a “dead” city that stuns visitors with its emptiness and abandonment. The tragedy of April 26, 1986 turned Pripyat from a city of the future into a ghost town, a shadow city. For 30 years, Pripyat remained a shadow, an echo of the past — until recently.
People who love Pripyat create whole amazing, unique creative projects to bring the city back to life.
In October 2016, Yuri Tomashevsky from Moscow lit up the sign of the “Energetik” House of Culture for the first time in 30 years.
According to Yuri, a few years ago he became a fan of the “S.T.A.L.K.E.R” game series and grew so fascinated with exploring Pripyat that he began making regular field trips to the Zone and even decided to revive the dead city. Using diodes connected to a battery, he restored the lighting of the well-known “Energetik” House of Culture from scratch.
In April 2017, Polish stalkers also lit up Pripyat.
With the help of a generator, they filled the long-abandoned, devastated streets with light, switched on the lights in schools and apartments, and even lit some of the remaining lamps on the roofs of the buildings.
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The stalkers’ goal was to prove that old Soviet equipment can still work in any conditions, even after 30 years.
In September of the same year, Polish tourists, as they claimed, got a Ferris wheel turning without electricity. After recording the process on video, they returned the wheel to its previous state.
In April 2018, the dead city of Pripyat came to life for one night. Alexander Sirota was the organizer of the “Chernobyl-32. Light Your Candle” event.
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At exactly 1:23 a.m., 32 candles were lit on the central street in memory of the victims of the accident: the liquidators, and the people whose lives were shattered by the evacuation.
Also, 500 electric light bulbs were placed in the houses across the district, a reminder that life had once been in full swing behind every now-dead window.
Pripyat emptied out long ago, and only shadows remain. “Shadow People” is one of the creative projects by graffiti artists from Poland and Germany, through which they tried to breathe life into a city deserted long ago.
The drawings they left on the walls of the houses seem to remind us how much pain those who survived this horror endured.
The graffiti artists tried to show that, were it not for human negligence, there could be living people in place of these shadows steeped in suffering.
All of these creative projects should remind us, the current generation, that we must remember the mistakes of the past and, learning from that experience, build a new and brighter future — one with no place for devastating accidents, death, pain, or broken lives.