On a bright Sunday morning in Kiev, outside the Minskaia metro station and in front of a Ukrainian McDonald’s, a streamlined yellow tour bus idles its engine. The driver waits for passengers heading into the exclusion zone, a radioactive no-man’s-land created two decades ago by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Soon about 20 people, mostly Ukrainians and Russians, gather near the bus. Two young, dark-haired men hand out white and blue radiation hazmat suits, yellow plastic slickers, and bottles of water. One of the day-trippers is Alex, born and raised in Pripyat until he was 10. Now 30, he is part of a virtual community of mostly young people who once lived in Pripyat, the forgotten city that was built in the 1970s for workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power station less than two miles away. At the time, Pripyat was called the City of the Future. Instead it was abandoned April 27, 1986, when its residents became the first and, so far, only permanent nuclear refugees in the world.
The trip, which the former Pripyat residents organized, coincided with the 20th anniversary of the explosion. It also happened to fall very close to Radonitsa, the day of remembrance of the dead, when family members visit the graves of their relatives. The entire city of Pripyat is a grave, a place that died more than 20 years ago and will never come back to life.
Once we are all collected, radiation protection suits, water bottles, and lunch bags in hand, we board the bus. The organizers begin the trip by introducing themselves. People have come from all over the world, including the cities of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Kiev. Most of them have never met except on their virtual community at pripyat.com. Alex, from Kiev, and Dmitri, from St. Petersburg, sit behind Christophe Bisson and me. Bisson, a French painter and philosopher, invited me to come on this trip when he and I attended a Chernobyl conference in Budapest. “I’m the only English speaker. I can translate for you,” Dmitri says.
