On the overnight train ride from Odessa to Lviv, Photomat had shown me the documentary he had about the Chernobyl incident - I really have to get the name of it from him. It had footage of Pripyat, showing it as an active and lively city just before and after the explosion.
I was amazed at how well preserved the buildings were from what I could see in the footage. Other than windows being shattered, which can probably be chalked up to vandalism more than decay, the structures themselves were in amazing shape. The big difference was the vegetation and animal life.
When we had passed through the main checkpoint heading into the city proper, we were told by Evgeny (photo at right with me), our (amazing) guide that we were now driving on the main thoroughfare. Considering that the road was just wide enough for his car and the trees were canopied and just brushing the top, this seemed quite an impossibility. However, the documentary clearly showed that this main thoroughfare was quite an avenue - along the lines of Toronto's University Avenue - two grand roads with a garden-like divide. We just couldn't see it, nature had taken over completely and the road was one big pothole.
Another difference was in the overall layout of the city. We had made our way to the top of the hotel, sweating in our white alien-like anti-radiation suits, climbing 9 (or 10?) floors to get a wonderful view of the entire city from the long-gone wall-to-wall windows in what I assume had been a penthouse suite. Scanning the horizon, you felt like you were in some Green Party's Utopian cityscape - you could barely see below the 3rd floor of any building as everything was overgrown with trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, and other native forms of vegetation. It was quite beautiful - so green and lush and quiet. You could almost imagine that you were an explorer and had found a lost civilization - until your dosimeter would go off to remind you of all the radiation.
Looking at the documentary gave us a completely different view of the cityscape. Pripyat looked more like what you would expect to see in European locations like Kyiv, Prague, or Vienna. Most of the buildings had vast concrete plazas in front of them and the city had a larger metal/concrete to nature ratio. They were surrounded by forest and had some garden areas around the housing but schoolyards were concrete, and so were roads, and walkways. It's amazing just how easily plants were able to take hold in this concrete jungle and reclaim it.
The other night, we caught a bit of the series Life After People, which is supposed to chronicle in a timeline what will happen to cities once man is gone and nature and animals take over again. Sounded interesting and it's been recommended to me since I like to shoot abandoned spaces. The episode which looks at life after 20 years is supposed to focus entirely on Pripyat as they used it as the real-life example of the level of decay for this time span. I'm looking forward to finding some time to look at that episode and see how well it meshes with my own personal experience.
I was glad that we had watched the documentary after our trip as we could compare what we had seen and experienced to how the city looked and functioned when it was still vital.
