Chernobyl home

Special Christmas trip

An eye-opening experience.

                   Marylyn, US, Ohio

Thank you for all of your hard work, you were an amazing tour guide and your guidance is on an important topic all human beings living in this global society should know about.

                   Elise, Fulbright scholar, US

  HOME.

  This short simple word denotes something important for each human being.

  You idea and your perception of your home and, perhaps many other things which matter in your life, will be different after this one day special trip devoted to Chernobyl homes.

  The homes were abandoned because of the explosion of the nuclear reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. More than three hundred thousand people lost their homes in the adjacent area.

  Now these empty homes welcome only those few human beings who come to this abandoned space.

  Empty cottages in the empty village of Zalissja.

  Missing cottages in the bulldozed and buried village of Kopachi.

  The decaying 5-story apartment buildings and cottages along the asphalt streets of the small provincial town of Chernobyl, now sparsely populated by a handful of shift-workers.

  The thousands of homes in (then-brand-new) 16-, 9- and 5-story apartment buildings, once assembled in the neat and beautiful town of Pripyat, surrounded by the pine forest. Forty-five thousand Pripyat residents were evacuated during three hours, one and a half days after the explosion. They were told – “temporarily, just for 3 days.” As it turned out, it is for eternity! In this town the clock still shows the year of 1986, in the country of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  You will be guests at all of these homes.

Places of Chernobyl glory

  The trip is particularly interesting when, in the overgrown with greenery Chernobyl zone, there is no foliage. In this trip, with the aid of the guide-instructor, a Chernobyl veteran, these usually hidden and “mute” places will tell a story of combat with the aftermath of the world-biggest nuclear reactor explosion – the dramatic and heroic story. It will be a trip into the Chernobyl glory.

  In finding our bearings on the field of the Chernobyl battle, we will be much aided by Oleg Veklenko's unique photos about the life and work of men, drafted from reserve to the 25^th brigade of radiation, chemical and bacteriological protection in the first days after the explosion, and video about the contemporary Chernobyl.

  This trip will differ not only by its route (it includes several rarely or never visited spots), but also by WHAT WE WILL SEE on the route, WHAT WE WILL PAY ATTENTION TO, WHAT WE WILL LEARN about these places, the Chernobyl disaster, and contemporary catastrophes in general.

  The guide-instructor of the trip – Sergii Mirnyi, a former officer of Chernobyl radiation surveillance several months after the explosion; now a writer, scriptwriter, scholar of Chernobyl and contemporary disasters and expert in their mitigation.

  The trip will include a visit to the observation building, near the Sarcophagus covering the destroyed Reactor #4at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

  We will have a short hike in the abandoned town of Pripyat, which was home for the ChNPP workers and their families, and had forty-five thousand inhabitants before the explosion. En route we will see critically important spots and material objects of the mitigation of the Chornobyl disaster, and two former villages: one uninhabited and one demolished (we will make a stop in the first).

  We will also see the Chornobyl town. In addition, we will visit an active village and an amateur museum of local lore of Ukrainian Polissya.