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Beat and I re-grouped at the van and took a break. A quick phone call to Laura and René revealed that they were still exploring Pripyat roofs, so we asked Yuriy if he could take us to the old fire station in the southwest for half an hour. The station was nothing special – a large hall for the (absent) fire trucks and some adjacent common rooms (one of them full of soft drink bottles).

On the other side of the road however was a much more interesting site: Pripyat’s old militia station, which was full of old vehicles: Cars, buses, trucks, dredgers, even a small tank BRDM-2D combat vehicle. There were further vehicles on top of the militia building, and I still have no idea how they got up there. I was initially worried that the radiation around those vehicles would be very high, as metal absorbs radioactivity better, but it wasn’t. This meant that they hadn’t been used during the accident, and all of those vehicles had been moved to the old junkyard at the border of the zone.

Photo Albums

Album: Fire Station

Album: Militia Station

Map for this Journal Entry

The Chernobyl Journal will conclude next week.

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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.

Photo Albums

Album: Cinema & Theater

Album: Community Center

Video: Port & Theater

Another short video, showing Pripyat port from part ten of the journal, and the inside of the theater and music school.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xmDodebXdA

Map for this Journal Entry

The Chernobyl Journal continues in part 12 with a trip to the Pripyat fire and militia stations.

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We spent most of the rest of the day in Pripyat’s north-east. The old Pripyat hospital was one of the biggest and most rewarding locations we visited. It consisted of five large buildings, about 6 stories high, all interconnected. The layout was rectangular so that one large corridor with rooms to each side lead through the whole length, flanked by two staircases at the side. In the middle of the buildings were open entrance areas, which seemed to have been used as common rooms or receptions. Almost every room was filled with medical equipment, from beds, cupboards, medicine bottles, autoclaves to whole operation rooms.

Visiting abandoned hospitals, hotels, schools or office complexes is very different from visiting abandoned factories. While factories’ layouts are vast and irregular, hospitals, schools, and such have similar layouts on every floor. Every floor however has certain differences -- some subtle, such as different shades of corridor colors -- some extreme, such as one floor being clean and empty while the one above is flooded or burned. Moving from floor to floor feels like moving through alternate realities, histories or personalities of the same space. There is also something unsettling, remotely nightmarish about the repetitiveness and drawn-out perspective of long corridors, which speaks a strange dialect of claustrophobia.

Maternity Ward

One of the areas in the hospital I spent a lot of time in was the maternity ward. The rusty-white baby cribs standing in a paint-shedding room under observation of two lonely chairs were a sight both sad and peaceful, as opposed to the twisted ob/gyn chair in the room next to them (somebody had even put one of the chairs outside in front of the entrance, which felt artificial and unnecessary). Other floors were largely flooded and still icy from the cold temperatures. Another interesting hospital area was the clinic behind the main building. Each window bore a different symbol related to science -- physics, chemistry, biology, botanics, through which the sun shone and cast interesting shadows on the floor.

After a while of wandering around the hospital, René called me and offered me a great view from the roof. I went up to the top floor, climbed up the rusty ladder, and found René and Laura at the other end of the roof -- celebrating the zone with a champagne bottle. During their stay, the two must have climbed on eight or more Pripyat roofs -- a record possibly broken only by looters. I couldn’t refuse a sip, and drinking champagne on an abandoned hospital roof with the Chernobyl reactor visible on the horizon became one of the bizarre highlights of the trip.

Photo Album: Pripyat Hospital

Pripyat Hospital (Album)

Video: Pripyat Hospital

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN3lb62Q6mw

Map for this Journal Entry

(Chernobyl Journal continues in part nine with a trip to partly destroyed Pripyat school)

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We waited for half an hour for Yuriy to come back -- he had gone to the security perimeter to report the looters -- until we took up Tanya’s offer of quickly going to “school #2″. The school, one of Pripyat’s seven schools, was supposed to be south of Lenin square. We followed her through the woods around old apartment blocks, came across an old electronics store with lots of old TVs, but didn’t find the school.

TV Shop (Album)

The driver picked us up on Lenin square (Yuriy was still gone) and drove us north to the old public swimming pool. It was a fantastic location featuring a great, multilayered pool hall with a big jump tower. Its roof was angled upwards, and the evening sun tinted the hall in a warm yellow through the enormous windows, which contrasted its otherwise blue hue. The pool itself was about 5 meters deep, its floor full of rubble, insulation material and remains of plastic chairs. The building also contained a gym hall with wooden floors.

Swimming Pool (Album)

Just next to the pool was “school #3″, a huge complex of two buildings full of classrooms and halls. Its entrance was barely accessible, it was so overgrown. In one of the classrooms I found an old school project about traditional clothing, pinned up on a wooden board. In the dining hall we found a large number of childrens’ respirators on the floor, their empty eyes staring at the paint chips in the ceiling like little grey elephant heads. It was an eerie teaser for the school we would see the next day.

School #3 (Album)

We spent an hour around the pool and school #3. But the lights was getting dim, and Yuriy was back too, so it was time to head home to Chernobyl before the mutants came out of the sewers.

After a stopover at the Chernoshop (an unspectacular room in a white building, mostly containing alcohol shelves and people in blue or green uniforms), we got back to the InterInform agency building. There, we checked our hands and feet for contamination (Beat had a little scare because the machine didn’t work when he used it), thoroughly washed our hands, and went to dinner. It was good Ukrainian food -- lots of vegetables, along with rather fatty (but nevertheless tasty) meat. Unfortunately, it drove my stomach into further culinary culture shock, and I spent the night hugging the toilet bowl of my hotel room, while the rest of the troupe checked out the local Chernobar.

This is not the end, only the end of the first day. Stay tuned for day two.

Video: Small Contamination Control

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HYgK5i-8TE

Map of this Journal Entry

Chernobyl Journal continues in part seven.

Photo Set: "Autumn Leaves"

Some months ago, my friend and fellow photographer Annie Bertram recommended to me to visit the  historic automobile cemetery Gürbetal near Bern. The area was originally planned as an open air museum for vintage cars from the 1940s – 1970s, but the owners (who dealt in used car parts) never realized the project. So, the car collection became a car cemetery under birch trees, which was recently used for a national art exhibition. Unfortunately, the area is now closed for environmental reasons, and its future uncertain.

My wife and I visited the cemetery in October, one day before it closed. It was an amazing autumn day, and birch leaves were covering the cars under the trees. I’m happy to present to you a photo sets called “Autumn Leaves” – it contains 34 color and 20 black & white pictures.