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Who in their right mind would ever visit Chernobyl? You’d be surprised.
Guided tours are now available through select businesses in Kiev. For the adventurous types who want to experience a true adventure, Chernobyl represents one of the only frontiers that have been completely abandoned by man-kind.
Many people find that kind of abandon alluring.
Chernobyl is truly the only place in the world where you can “time warp” back to Soviet-era 1986. You will find vehicles, buildings, and other items representative of that era. Books remain opened to the page their former owner had left them at, toys remain strewn across the floor as their owners hastily evacuated, and apartment windows remain open since they were opened in 1986.
From a distance, Pripyat and Chernobyl look like regular towns. However, as you approach the towns, you begin to see that they are not regular towns at all, but skeletal shells of their former grandeur: veritable ghost towns. Things are left exactly as they were when the explosion occurred: dishes left on tables, toys left lying on the floor as though children will return momentarily to resume playing with them, clothes still hanging in closets—time literally frozen.
Thousands of families fled the region, leaving behind all of their possessions, as they believed they would return after a “temporary” evacuation. To date, less than 300 people live in the exclusion zone, with most of them older senior citizens.
Many people find this kind of deserted place fascinating, which is why this has become a popular tourist attraction. It is not often where you can witness a man-made desert, technology gone wrong and left to rot.
Exploring Ghost Towns of Frozen Time
The effect is haunting and multi-layered. Despite the appearance of normality, visitors know the history of what took place here, and the instant flash of how quickly a normal humming life was shattered into historical tragedy.
Stroll through the streets where people shopped for daily groceries, walked their children to school, set off for work in the morning. Witness the homes and apartment buildings where families would return at the end of each day for an evening meal, where parents would tuck their happy children into cozy beds, sending them off to dreamland without a worry in the world. Part of what is so halting about witnessing Chernobyl is the seeming normality of it all—it is easy to picture the life that once occurred here. But this place literally became poisonous, and spread that poison to surrounding areas, forever changing the face of the world.
Chernobyl is not the first place where sites terror and tragedy have become places that attract visitors. Auschwitz and other concentration camps from the reign of Nazi Germany in World War II, the Killing Fields in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge regime practiced genocide, and the internment camps where Japanese Americans were sent after the attack on Pearl Harbor, are just a few examples of sites where human tragedies took place – and are now places that are open to the public for viewing and exploration.
Witnessing History First-Hand
People want to learn about these events and witness them firsthand, in a way to know that they are real. It is a very different experience to read about something in a history book, to see it on the news, and to witness it with your own eyes. Seeing sites like Chernobyl personally makes them more immediate, more real – not removed from reality and time and turned into a concept, which occurs frequently in history books. Viewing these tragedies brings them into the present for people who see them, marking history in a completely different way.
What happened at Chernobyl is a significant part of human history. To appropriately honor the horrors that occurred there, and to raise awareness of the impact that these events had on the world, it is important for people to be able to witness the site firsthand. This is one of the reasons why sites of human tragedy become tourist attractions—they serve to educate, but also to remind people of the fragile nature of life, and how precious it is.
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