Chernobyl is the site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history. In the city, an estimated 200 tons of radioactive material sits beneath a steel containment structure. Weightless, odorless and invisible to the human eye, it has sunk into the group and swept across the landscape. The 30-kilometer radius around the most contaminated area is a mausoleum of man’s technological folly, writes National Geographic. Chernobyl was designated a dead zone 31 years ago, but over the past decade, an increasing number of self-proclaimed “stalkers” have regularly entered the zone illegally.
“You feel like the last person on Earth,” Eugene Knyazev, who estimates that over the course of 50 trips, he has spent a year of his life in the exclusion zone, said to National Geographic. “You wander through empty villages, cities, roads. This is a magical sensation.”
On April 16, 1986, a series of mistakes at the Chernobyl power plant led to the worst nuclear disaster in history. An explosion at reactor number four released a cloud of radioactive dust that poisoned millions of acres across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. It also forced the evacuation of nearly 100,000 people. The political and economic consequences were profound and enduring, writes Nat Geo. Stalkers see their hobby as an escape into another reality, says Stuart Lindsay, a Chernobyl researcher at the University of Stirling. They think of themselves as both students of history and documentarians. They hope to prevent the memory of Chernobyl from disappearing by documenting it — all the while, getting away from the haste of the city.
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