Civilizations & archaeology

Origins of Pripyat

4 February 1970

Pripyat was a planned city in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, founded as a home for the workers of the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and later considered a model Soviet nuclear town. By the mid-1980s it had around fifty thousand residents, with modern apartment blocks, schools, a cultural centre and an amusement park. After the explosion at Chernobyl's fourth reactor on 26 April 1986, the whole population was evacuated within about two days. The city has been abandoned ever since and lies in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where nature has reclaimed streets and buildings, and it has become a symbol of the disaster and a site of limited tourism.

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