Reflections on Ruin

It's been a long road, filtering through the hundreds of photos from Pripyat and the reactor, trying to whittle them down to those few perfect ones. The ones that capture the essence of our trip, truly convey the mood of that abandoned and silent city, and tell the story that we ourselves can only begin to fully comprehend.

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.

Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates

Its been the day of the dead as we travelled from one end of the city to the other to explore two different cemeteries.

LYCHAKIV CEMETERY

Our first trek was to the famous historic necropolis created in 1787. Originally located on several hills in in the borough of Lychakiv outside the city limits, it was expanded in the mid-1850s in a design of alleys and round-abouts and quickly became the main cemetery for the city as most others closed. Denominations here include all Christian sects, Roman Catholics, Eastern Rite Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. After WWII, Lviv was annexed by the Soviet Union and many of historical monuments were destroyed as well as many sculptures - and this devastation continued well into the 70s. However, in 1975 the cemetery was declared a national historic monument and this stopped the vandalism. Today is it one of the main tourist attractions in the city. Some of the famous Ukrainian people buried in the cemetery include:

• Ivan Franko - Ukrainian poet
• Oleksandr Tysowkyj - founder of Ukrainian scouting
• Jacques Hnizdovsky - painter, printmaker, sculptor, bookplate designer and illustrator of numerous books both in English and Ukrainian
• Veterans of WWI and WWII
• Victims of the NKVD

I knew I would love this cemetery the minute I walked into it. Like Pere Lachaise in Paris, the tombs are mostly above ground and there are many cobblestone rows of ancient crumbling tombs. The statuary in the old section is quite beautiful and mostly angels or busts of the people that have died. The most unique, and quite pretty monuments that I found were the ones that included cameos on ceramic in sepia for the 1920s monuments and in pastels for the 1960s.

Many parts of the cemetery seem to have been forgotten, with the plots overgrown with vines, moss and tall wild ferns. We were able to meander down the side aisles where it felt like you were in a jungle and some tombstone were completely covered over and could no longer be read or, sometimes, even be seen.

If not for the tour groups I could have been there all day.

JEWISH CEMETERY

Although they don't put a name to this cemetery on the complete other side of town in our guidebook - it was recommended as a place to go to see what was left of the Jewish cemetery which had been destroyed in the war and to see several soldier's memorials. Somewhere near there was also supposed to be a marker for a former concentration camp, which we were never able to find.

This cemetery was also quite beautiful, with the same above ground tombstones and old metal and stone statuary. Although many of the plots were also overgrown with moss and vines, you could tell that many more people were coming in here and taking care of the plots than in the other cemetery. Everything was a bit cleaner and well maintained.

We spent quite a long time just wandering around, looking for the resting places of the Soviet soldiers (kind of found), Ukrainian soldiers (found), German soldiers (really tried to find and couldn't), and victims of the NKVD (nope).

As we were winding our way out towards the back entrance we made it into the small Jewish section of the cemetery. It was an interesting sight. The tombstones, both old and new, were in both Ukrainian and Yiddish, and were quite beautiful. They were both old and new, spanning design styles from modern shiny marble to the old stone with inset cameos. What was different in this section, something that we had not seen anywhere else, were the cages. Many of the tombstones and memorials were in cages surrounding the entire plot - some as large as about 6' x 6'. The doors were locked and you could not get close. This seemed so odd to us and then we came upon a memorial that had been defaced - the name was missing and the engraved face looked like it had been gouged out. We think that perhaps it is from fear of this type of defacement and vandalism that this section has resorted to putting protective cages around their loved one's memorials. If so, it is sad that people have to do this in order to protect their memories.

It's been a long day, we walked from the middle of the city to one end, the back and to the other end, then back again. My dogs are barking big time.

Tomorrow is our last day in Lviv as we head back to Kyiv for a last hurrah before our flight back to Canada. I will miss this city of the Nouveau Art.