An eerie window into Chernobyl’s exclusion zone

One night in 2017, photographer Pierpaolo Mittica was walking around the skeletal remains of Pripyat, an abandoned city in northern Ukraine’s Chernobyl exclusion zone. He was with a small group of camo-clothed young men, mostly aged in their late 20s and early 30s, and they were keeping quiet to avoid the attention of police and security. They had spent all day sleeping in an apartment after trekking around 60 km (37 miles) through the forest to reach the city, but now that the sun had set, they were moving through its empty buildings, looking through drawers and cabinets, picking out photographs, posters, diaries and any other artefacts that they could find.

Mittica was photographing a faction of Ukrainian stalkers – a niche subculture of young Ukrainians who would break into the Chernobyl exclusion zone and explore the area for days at a time. The activity’s roots lie in the release of a 2007 survival-horror video game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., which dropped players into Pripyat and its surrounding areas as they fight of mutants and radiation, which inspired young people to seek the place out in real life.

“They live like they are the last survivors in the world,” Mittica explains. “They move around during the night visiting the most iconic places of the city, and they will take stuff like books, posters and so on and put them in dry places to preserve them, because they want to preserve the memory of the city and the memory of the accident – it was a very, very incredible trip.”

Pictures that he took on that journey, featuring an intimate hiding spot in a building’s attic alongside artworks that the stalkers had chosen to preserve, now feature in Mittica’s new photobook Chernobyl. He first visited the former nuclear power plant and its surrounding area over two decades ago, which in 1986 was the site of a major disaster. An exploding reactor released millions of radioactive particles into the surrounding atmosphere and caused the deaths of more than 30 power plant operators and firemen.

Since then, Mittica has returned to Chernobyl over 20 times, photographing the area’s surreal, eerie energy, and the people who exist within it. While the radioactive exclusion zone conjures images of abandoned landscapes, devoid of human presence, what Mittica found was in fact an area teeming with life. “[People think] that the exclusion zone must be a dead zone, that people must not be there – but it’s full of life” he says. “There are 4,000 people living inside the zone, because the zone must be secure – there are military, army personnel, policemen and firemen who must all take care of the zone, and 2,000 workers who take care of the nuclear power plant.”

His photobook is a window into life and society in the shadow of the power plant. “They live in Chernobyl City in the exclusion zone, which is like a normal Ukrainian city, because they need facilities for the workers – they have shops, markets restaurants, bars, a gym, a church, a cultural centre, and they need workers,” he continues. “It was fascinating, so I started documenting this strange place.”

Also living within the exclusion zone were the samosely (resettlers) people. After the 1986 accident, people in the surrounding areas were evacuated and relocated, usually to suburbs of large cities. A small handful though, rejected their new lives and eventually returned to their homes, living largely isolated lives despite being prohibited from doing so and risking the hazardous health effects of radiation. Existing alongside them were tourists of different stripes, from the guided tour day trippers to the more adventurous, below-the-radar stalkers, as well as a Hasidic Jewish contingent who would make pilgrimages to Chernobyl to visit the grave of 18th century founder of Hasidism Rabbi Menachem, Nochum Twersky.

“When I saw them there were hundreds of these Jewish people going around the city, it was an incredible scene to see,” says Mittica. “The story is very important, because with Chernobyl, there is not only the people or nature, but also the history of the place. We only remember Chernobyl for the accident, but it has a long history before that.”

That history is now tightly sealed though, and quickly being forgotten. In February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the area was evacuated, including the remaining samosely people for the second time in their lives. The power plant was occupied for just over a month, but even though Russian troops eventually withdrew, the exclusion zone was filled with countless active landmines. It means that the adventure tourism of the stalkers, the history of the Hasidic Jews and the homes of the people who lived there, will be inaccessible for future generations.

“Chernobyl was the biggest technological accident that has happened in the world,” Mittica says. “Behind the accident is politics, economics, nuclear [science] that all influence our fragile life. Chernobyl is a huge world of great humanity that someone tried to destroy.

“There are people still facing the consequences.” He continues. “But this humanity still stands, and I tried to show the face of these human beings.”

Chernobyl by Pierpaolo Mittica is published by GOST Books

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