Pripyat

The city of Pripyat is located five kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 50,000 people lived here until 1986. Today, Pripyat is a heavily guarded and highly contaminated ghost town in the middle of the radioactively contaminated zone, which stretches from the Ukraine deep into Belarus. Most of the villages have been evacuated. Anyone wishing to enter the zone needs special permission, and anyone wishing to leave is subject to a dosimetric check. The 30-km zone is fenced in with barbed wire. It is an area arbitrarily measured with a compass and does not correspond to the actual contamination of the soil. Around 15,000 people live or work here. In the still active 3rd block of the power plant, in the zone administration, with the militia or in the numerous research facilities, they find coveted, well-paid jobs. Many of the villages are inhabited. They are inhabited by their resettled and illegally returned, but tolerated owners or by people who deliberately flee to the practically unmonitored zone with its many empty houses. Pripyat is also the name of the river that flows past the power station into the Dnieper and still supplies the inhabitants of the zone with fish. "Pripyat" tells of survival in an improvised microcosm where you shouldn't eat, drink or breathe in dust when it's windy - but because radioactivity is imperceptible to the human senses, hardly anyone follows these recommendations.