Chernobyl Stalkers in the Dead Zone

Thanks to Keir Clarke for inspiration for post via Twitter...
One of the places that fascinates me is the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

I've been following some of the stories that have emerged from the area that had to be suddenly abandoned on the 26th of April 1986... There is also the growth of nuclear tourism into the area, which I have blogged about previously... Thanks to David Lambert for bringing me back a great book when he visited Las Vegas which used to host nuclear tourists...

The city of Pripyat was suddenly abandoned shortly after the incident, and lies within an exclusion zone which is still in operation...

The city also features in the book: "No Holiday: 80 places you don't want to visit"... (at no. 1) along with the Aral Sea, Bhopal, the DMZ, Guantanamo Bay and Gruinard.


There are various connections to be made with ideas such as "forbidden geographies" and "secret geographies" and it would also make an extreme Urbex trip of the kind that are documented so vividly over at the excellent URBANITY blog.

Keir Clarke's recent Tweet led me to this Vimeo video by Donald Weber featuring the people who visit the exclusion zone to search and remove valuable items...

Chernobyl Stalker from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

The activities mirrors themes from a movie that I first saw over 20 years ago, from famous Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Today, real stalkers live inside the official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables.

This story documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age.

Fascinating stuff...

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