Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

In place of an epilogue

From materials published in Belarusian newspapers in 2005

… Kiev travel agency offers tourist trips to Chernobyl …

We have arranged an itinerary, starting in the ghost city of Pripyat. You will visit abandoned multi-storey apartment blocks with blackened laundry on their balconies and children’s prams. The former police station, hospital and the Municipal Communist Party Committee building. The slogans of the Communist era are still there: not even radiation can obliterate them.

From Pripyat, our route takes us to ghost villages where wolves and wild boar scavenge through the cottages in broad daylight. They have been proliferating, monstrously!

The culmination of the trip or, as they say in the brochure, the ‘highlight’, is a viewing of the Shelter Reactor, more commonly known as the ‘Sarcophagus’. Hastily constructed over the destroyed Reactor No. 4, it has long been covered in cracks through which its deadly contents emit background radiation from what remains of the nuclear fuel. You are certainly going to have something to tell your friends about when you get back home. This is not just some excursion to the Canary Islands or Miami …

Your trip concludes with souvenir photographs at the stele in memory of the fallen heroes of Chernobyl, to give you a sense of your involvement in history.

After the excursion, lovers of extreme tourism are invited to enjoy a picnic lunch of ecologically safe food, washed down with red wine. And Russian vodka. You are assured that, during your day spent in the exclusion zone, you will be subjected to a dose of radiation less than that involved in a standard medical X-ray check-up. You are, however, advised not to bathe, or eat any fish you have caught or game you have shot. Neither should you pick berries or mushrooms, or roast them on a campfire. You should also not give ladies bunches of wild flowers.

Do you think I am out of my mind? You would be mistaken: atomic tourism is in great demand, especially among Westerners. People crave strong new sensations, and these are in short supply in a world so much explored and readily accessible. Life gets boring, and people want a frisson of something eternal …

Visit the atomic Mecca. Affordable prices.