Chernobyl Journal #11: Music and Mirrors

Saturday, June 20th, 2009 | decay, gallery, hdr, project wormwood, sounds, travel journal, video

This is part eleven of my travel photo journal to the Chernobyl zone of exclusion. Check out the Chernobyl Journal page for the full story, all pictures, videos and sounds.category.

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Leaving the docks, I went on to the cinema/theater complex to the north. In front of it must have been a large gathering area, probably with fountains, which was now a collection of concrete plates with yellow grass between them. On the side of the cinema, there was a large red-and-blue Soviet mosaic on the wall. Unfortunately, the lighting inside the cinema was almost absent, and I couldn’t get a good shot of the projection room (Beat has a picture of the room, I don’t know how long he had to expose in there!). Not surprisingly, its closed nature made the cinema one of the spots in Pripyat with the lowest radiation levels I had measured (<0.1 uSv/h, lower than my living room).

More rewarding was the theatre at the back end of the cinema, featuring another grand entrance. It was a two-story building with an unusual amount of rooms in it. I assumed that parts of it also featured as a restaurant or café, but we found out later that it was also used as a musical school. On the ground floor was a medium-sized theater stage - not as big as the one behind the Palace of Culture, but it had a grand piano standing on it. I had to cross the (unstable) stage because the floor in front of it was impassible, and found out that only 4 of its keys still worked - enough for some scary audio recordings. Another grand piano was lying open on its side in a white, dusty room on the second floor.

[Listen to sounds of a Pripyat Piano]

The last building in Pripyat’s northeast I visited was a community center, which was a two-story building for Pripyat service providers (for example hairdressers or pharmacies). The top floor had a number of rooms with large (but mostly broken) mirrors. In one of the cupboards I found old holiday decorations - probably last used in December 1985.

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