The full set is here (new images will be added as the set grows)

Underneath the hangar roofs, among nooks and crannies, a labyrinth of train tracks spread thinly, guiding yet confusing, watched over by knowing symbols.

Slowly, daylight creeped in, and revealed a myriad of structures, some curious, some threatening, all of them alien.

In the gorges of containers we walked, multicolored steel valleys full of cargo. The crane moaned and hissed as we passed it by.

And on the horizon, the wilderness of industry, the drums and spheres of containment, steam against the sky.

View the whole set:

Like skeletal structures, welcoming us to enter them, we found the large halls where once workers stacked bricks in neat rows to dry them. The long shadows pointed east, while resting on old transport machinery.

Inside the factory, the deep, cool, and somewhat scary corridors of the ovens known as ‘kiln’. We didn’t enter them, trusting that the light wasn’t strong enough to fight the sleeping ogres hidden inside.

Up the stairs, atop the kiln, a wide desert of brick dust, occasionally broken by humble columns, symmetric compartments and rows of valves, like toddlers in blue and yellow overalls. Fields of regular, rusty, hat-shaped ventilation shafts.

Next to the brickworks, a beautiful old villa, overgrown by a jungle of precious garden plants. It must have been the residence of the owner and his family.

Finally, on our way back to the car, a sturdy little plant, triumphant in her conquest over a man-made thing, looked up from her sunbath, and waved us good-bye.

And here is the full gallery:

Having seen and commented so much of Dave’s work, I decided to dip my feet into abstract waters. I’d love to hear what you have to say about my first three pictures.

Exhbition homepage: “Industrieromantik” (until 14 September 2009)

Exhibition location: Ziegel Oh Lac (part of Rote Fabrik)

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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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After seeing the school, I decided to go explore Pripyat port to the east. The port must have been a beautiful spot back in 1986. Located at the River Pripyat, a café with a round outside terrace overlooked the passenger dock, accessible via a wide stairway [that's how it looked in 1986]. From a ship passenger’s point of view, the city entrance had been through a gate flanked by the café on the left side and the dock’s tower to the right side, and V-shaped columns in the middle. A bus stop and ticket office used to be right after the gate.

Frozen Beauty

The growth of plants was stronger around the dock, and the radiation was also higher. My Geiger counter told me not to sit on the stairs, its values being about the same level as at the amusement park (4 uSv/h). Nevertheless, the view from the dock was breathtaking: The river was still frozen and stretched out like a wide field of ice to the southeast. In the distance, I could see a crooked red wooden house which had slid into the river and stuck out of the ice like a overstocked steamboat. To the north, the river ended in a bay, which used to be a beach. A couple of steps and a railing led from the dock into the ice. On the other edge of the river: A long stretch of grassy land towards Belarus. It was so peaceful.

I walked around in the café (which apparently had a lot of customers even after the accident, considering the many bottles of beer standing around the tables on the terrace). The large windows featured colorful stained glass pictures. Apart from shooting pictures and video, I also recorded an interesting sound from a loose piece of glass vibrating in the wind.

[Sound: Vibrating Glass in the Pripyat Port Cafe (mp3, 0:22)]

In the lower floor of the dock tower I found an old leather chair standing in a room overgrown with moss. From this room, I saw a large crow or predatory bird, flying from the dock towards the city center. While I had read that the zone has unexpectedly become home to many of wild animals, it was the only animal I had seen in Pripyat. No birds, no insects, not even spiderwebs.

Photo Album: Pripyat Port

Pripyat Port (Album)

Map for this Journal Entry

The Chernobyl Journal continues in part eleven with a visit to a theater and music school.

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After wandering around the hospital for two hours, I went back to the van, where our InterInform colleagues were waiting (the driver was busy playing handheld video games). I discovered some radioactive hot spots in the moss before the clinic which Yuriy confirmed with his Geiger counter. He then offered to show us “school #1″, another large complex just opposite of the hospital.

School #1 was falling apart; its west wing had succumbed to the elements and reduced to a pile of rubble a couple of years ago. This meant we had to be extra careful which rooms to enter and which floors to walk on.

We entered through a large dining hall leading into the main entrance hall. Old posters and bulletin boards hung on the walls. A long corridor used to be the school’s wardrobe, a maze of teal-colored metal skeletons; on the muddy floor, boxes full of children’s gas masks. As René, Laura and I walked through the corridor, we heard a piece of rock falling down from the wall, and shortly after that, another one. Not a safe place to stay.

Communist Sports, Arts and Crafts

I ventured off into another corner of the school and found the gym, which was littered with deflated sports balls. Out through the door, I walked across the schoolyard, entered another building and began exploring the upper floors. I came across a couple of well-preserved classrooms, some of which must have featured in Robert Polidori’s amazing “Zones of Exclusion” photo book. In some rooms, the floor was littered with books and almost impassible.

There were a lot of class projects, such as a collage of historical figures, and a huge number of communist illustrations (some of them obviously arranged by previous visitors). A very sad detail I found in one of the classrooms was a class wall, where black-and-white 1980s passport pictures of schoolchildren were arranged in circles. Many of the pictures had fallen off or were in very bad shape.

The Greenhouse

While the rest of the crew was still exploring the school, I walked around it. The floor was overgrown with moss and yellow grass, and the whole area around the school felt incomplete, as if the place hadn’t found its peace. In front of the school, I found an small glass building which turned out to be the school’s greenhouse. I managed to enter it, but couldn’t cross it, so dense were the plants inside.

Photo Albums: School and School Greenhouse

School #1 (Album)

Greenhouse (Album)

Video: School Number One

A video about the school and the greenhouse. Features some details not seen in the photos above.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aix5EehrAjw

Map for this Journal Entry

The Chernobyl Journal will continue next week with my favorite spot in Pripyat, the port.

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On the next day we got up at about 07:30, got dressed and had breakfast at the agency. The meal consisted of two courses: First, a plate full of pickled vegetables (along with the same meat from the day before). Second, a big chicken leg with a huge serving of tasteless, overcooked rice, which made me feel like the protagonist in “Everything Is Illuminated”. Half an hour later, we drove off north again.

The first few hours of the day were reserved for the area around the nuclear reactor. The Chernobyl power plant consisted of 6 reactors, two of which were never finished building. Those two (reactors 5 and 6) were located on an artificial island east of the power plant. The dozen abandoned construction cranes around the reactors gave the red structures a paradox aura of permanent incompleteness. We stopped at a distance from them and got a couple of great shots of both the reactors as well as the huge concrete turbine exhausts on the east side of the island. We also met two guards with their black-and-white border collie Misha, who dutifully barked at us intruders.

One of our biggest disappointments of the trip was that we weren’t allowed to see reactors 5 and 6 up close – even though we had seen pictures on the internet of people standing right in the middle of them. Instead, we drove non-stop to the entrance of the main area, where the colossus of disaster reactor #4 stood brooding in its concrete sarcophagus. The entrance was very well taken care of, flowers, green grass, two monuments to honor the victims – all of which felt artificial in the light of the decay around us.

The reactor itself didn’t look like you would imagine a nuclear reactor, as there were no dome-shaped concrete structures that are associated with nuclear power. Instead, it was an unspectacular, long, rectangular building, its only two outstanding features being the chimney and the bluish-gray sarcophagus. For me it was a strange experience realizing that I stood just 500 meters from the site of the one of the world’s worst environmental disaster and the most radioactive place on earth.

The vast area around the power plant was surprisingly lively; of the original four reactors, the three surviving the accident remained operating until the year 2000. Since then, the reactors are slowly being decommissioned, which will take at least until 2020. For this reason, a lot nuclear workers are still employed in Chernobyl; considering the number of blue hard hats we saw, the area can hardly be called abandoned (nor easily accessible for urban explorers)

Shortly after our arrival at the plant, a bus filled with officials and reporters stopped; it was the delegation of the ministry of internal affairs, whose surprise visit had almost caused the cancellation of our trip during the planning stage. We saw some giant hats, shook some hands, got back into the van, and drove off towards Pripyat.

Photo Album: Reactor Island

Reactor Island (Album)

Map of this Journal Entry

Chernobyl Journal continues in part eight with a visit to the Pripyat hospital.