Although the damaged reactor in its crumbling “sarcophagus” is still an extremely hazardous site, radiation levels in the town of Pripyat and in the surrounding countryside are considered safe enough for brief visits. Alex (“Sasha”) Sirota has visited his former home town several times and documented in these haunting photos images of a city drained of its inhabitants by nuclear disaster.
Behind my son on his wedding photo stands his good friend and classmate Aleksandr Amel’kin. It was with him that my son ran along the shore of the river Pripiat’ playing on April 26, 1986 (almost right by the Chernobyl nuclear station). After the evacuation these friends lost each other for many years. And it was just a year ago that they found each other again and Sasha Amel’kin became a witness at his friend’s wedding…
“When they met for the first time after being apart for 12 years, they sat for a whole day in Sasha’s room and reminisced about their childhood. Then, in the spring, they visited dead Pripiat’ twice together–the city of their childhood. And there, in the overgrown, neglected school, in their own classroom, they met yet another classmate by change–Sasha Beliaev, in whose soul there was also a vacuum, since he, too, had been suddenly torn away from his child’s memory of the city of his youth. To live further, to go into the future, these children had to return to their past (if even to the radioactive Pripiat’), in order to fill this vacuum and no repeat their parents’ mistakes.”
Lyubov Sirota