Illegal Tourism: Chernobyl Zone by Stalker Eyes

How far into the night sky have you ever peered? Have you ever really looked at it at all? These days, electric lights shine far brighter than the stars, so many people have never seen complete darkness or the Milky Way. Living in the twilight of the city, people have forgotten how to look at the stars — yet when you do look at them, you can feel yourself to be part of these distant worlds.

We travelled more than a hundred kilometres through night forests and abandoned towns and villages, beneath this incredible cosmic abyss. We visited many strange places whose very existence weaves the threads of a past, terrible catastrophe and of human heroism into today’s reality, creating an atmosphere you can only experience there — on the night-time rooftops of abandoned Pripyat, or on the basement steps of Medical Unit No. 126, where the clothes of the firemen who were first to fight the burning reactor are still kept. All of these men died within the first two weeks after the accident, and later tens of thousands more sacrificed their health to save our world from death.

Almost 30 years have passed. It is strange how quickly nature erases the traces of man. The wind whistles through apartments plundered by looters. The radioactive burial grounds of the equipment are now covered in thick undergrowth, and on the main square of Pripyat you will meet only a pack of wild wolves and the occasional visiting stalker — a fan of this post-apocalyptic, uninhabited world.

The former residents look back on their city with bitter melancholy; police officers and border guards go about their routine work; from time to time foreign tourists rush in for a few hours, up to their ears in respirators and dosimeters. But what is the Chernobyl Zone in the eyes of a stalker?

The Ferris wheel in the centre of Pripyat. You can only see it against the starry sky illegally.

I knew there was a large stalker community in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. There are always several groups of illegal residents in Pripyat. They adapt abandoned apartments to their needs and move around mainly at night. They have their own routes, their own quarrels, and a special atmosphere and subculture.

If you want to relive my experience and spend up to 6 days in the zone (not just the 2–3 hours of a bus excursion), feeling the full atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic world without people under the guidance of an experienced stalker-guide, email info@urbextour.com and we will try to organize a hike.

We walked under the waning moon through the dense summer air, infused with the scent of wild grasses. It is easy to walk in the cool of the night. At times, the various night creatures rustling about send shivers down your spine.

After a short rest and refilling our water supplies from the nearest marsh, we forded the Uzh River.

After winding through the fields, we reached the ruins of a church and decided to spend the night in an abandoned village; after crossing fields all night long, our energy was running out.

We found a perfectly preserved hut in the village and decided it would shelter us. In the morning we laid out our belongings and sat down to breakfast to the sound of a peacefully crackling dosimeter.

It was impossible to keep going during the daytime, so we used the day to rest well and replenish our water supplies. We took a stroll through the beautiful countryside and the abandoned village. There are ruins of an Orthodox church in the village; the local priests sort of look after it, and they have even fitted plastic-framed windows (!) in the altar room. In these parts, it looks really strange.

That night we faced a long and difficult trek. We pushed through the woods along deer trails, walked briskly under high-voltage power lines, and at dawn arrived at the outskirts of Pripyat.

The checkpoint of the abandoned city, with traces of a stalker camp. The forest between the checkpoint and the Jupiter factory made a very oppressive impression on me. The remnants of radioactive machinery are scattered among the trees. They give off so much radiation that even the scrap scavengers have not cut them up for metal.

We had lunch on a rooftop overlooking the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and went to sleep. It is not safe to walk during the afternoon — you can run into a police patrol.

That morning, and again at night, we ran into another group of stalkers and made friends. After that we met up with them now and then, right up until we left the zone. So we got to know each other, drank moonshine with bacon and garlic in a luxurious apartment, and set off to wander through the night city.

The stained glass of the “Pripyat” café near the pond.

On the far side of the pond stand huge, abandoned harbour cranes, 30 metres high. Against the starry sky, they looked like machines out of Star Wars.

In the light of dawn, we quietly made our way through some radioactive burial grounds to the oil depot to photograph an ISU-152 — a self-propelled artillery gun from the last world war, which sits behind the fence of the residential part of the petroleum base. Even now, I cannot get the smell of that radioactive dump out of my head.

The basement of Medical Unit No. 126 is the dirtiest place in the entire zone. The belongings of firefighters who received radiation doses several times the lethal level are piled up in a small room, and they are still highly radioactive. I have often thought about the dedication of the people who dealt with the aftermath of a radioactive catastrophe. I’ve watched a lot of old footage, and those people truly understood what they were doing — that they were sacrificing themselves for the sake of others. It is very… important, when the conditions in which people grow up make them capable of doing such things for the sake of others.

The logbook of an abortion clinic. There was no sex in the Soviet Union, but there were abortions.

Shoes on a kindergarten shelf. It is hard to imagine a gloomier place.

The traditional sunset on the roof of the 16-storey building, with a hookah and our new friends. It offers a beautiful view of the city.

A view over the fifth district at night. The ghostly, prefabricated nine-storey buildings, reflecting the pale moonlight, look like the gnawed bones of an animal.

One of the most impressive spots is a pair of armchairs on a roof that one of the stalkers had carried up there. We lingered there for many hours, smoking, gazing at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, into the depths of the starry sky, and out over the ghost town, where shaggy night animals scamper along the overgrown streets.

The Ferris wheel in the amusement park.

We watched the sunrise from the roof of the tower block bearing the coat of arms. The coat of arms fascinated me, because I have never seen anything like it anywhere else.

A stalker who fell asleep without waiting for dawn.

People say that sometimes stalkers rearrange these letters on the roof, and then the local police turn the whole city upside down searching for them.

The swimming pool of School No. 3.

Some places in the city have been specially and very carefully staged for excursion photos, like this room with gas masks.

A fresco in the post office. We looked in to take a couple of pictures. A long road through the night forests lay ahead.

After entering the dark stretch beyond the Red Forest, we heard the many-voiced howling of a large wolf pack somewhere nearby. We were completely creeped out, because they were howling right ahead of us. We pulled ourselves together, got ready to push through, and moved forward. I kept firecrackers on me, hoping that in a critical moment the loud bangs would scare the predators off. Everything worked out, and towards morning we came to a trolleybus that someone had abandoned in a field. It is a popular stalker base, and here we had a cup of tea and a bite to eat. The place reminded me of the bus from the film “Into the Wild”, where the main character spent his last days.

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A stalker bunkhouse. We caught up with our friends not far from Chernobyl-2.

A long and gloomy corridor between the antennas and the military town.

As sunset approached, we climbed the Duga-1 over-the-horizon radar system, a huge abandoned antenna towering 150 metres above the forests of the zone. Obivan climbed up to the resonator. It was windy, so the antenna was rocking and shaking, but he simply mastered his fear and walked along the pipe at a height of a hundred metres.

The higher we climbed, the stronger the wind became, and with it came a strange, almost ultrasonic “ping”. The wind whistled through the millions of steel cables and resonators of the antenna, singing a song that burned right through your brain.

From the top, we watched the setting sun and the columns of smoke. Somewhere far away, the forest was burning. Stalkers say the current authorities are deliberately burning out the forests, pushing a bill to strip the zone and shrink it next year from 30 to 10 kilometres.

Another terrible story. In an abandoned military town, there is a room full of dead wolves. It is not clear how they managed to get in, but the walls of the room are scratched from the inside by their paws, and two mummified bodies lie on the floor.

Then came the long journey home. For me, the zone is an infinite starry sky, an open expanse.

Passing under the power lines, we saw that a tree had fallen onto the wires. It was smouldering, dragging on the wires, and could have started a fire. We stopped at the forester’s house, drank some tea, and left a note with the exact coordinates of the incident.

If you want to relive my experience and spend up to 6 days in the zone (not just the 2–3 hours of a bus excursion), feeling the full atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic world without people under the guidance of an experienced stalker-guide, email info@urbextour.com and we will try to organize a hike.

If you want to visit Chernobyl and Pripyat the official way, contact us via the Chernobyl Exploration Tour booking page. We monitor the prices of all official tour operators and will help you find the best tour at the best price, with no commission.