Here's a BBC team's account of their recent visit to the region.

I don't really have anything coherent to add to this, yet, but I'll just rattle off a few points.

Even though the article states that people are returning to the area -- or rather the outer exclusion zone -- there's still a lot of emphasis on the return of "nature." Pripyat itself is still abandoned, as made clear in a Sept 2005 From Our Own Correspondent report by Nick Thorpe. (There's a map of the exclusion zones on David McMillan's Pripyat pages with some stunning photographs).

Thorpe's report flags the usual markers that help us navigate through any discussion of the ruins: "a Soviet Pompeii", "(p)ropaganda posters of stylised Soviet men and women still smile", cracked asphalt, "Pripyat is a town of ghosts" etc. I can't decide if the fairy-tale allusions are overblown or articulate successfully the visceral nature of his experience.

Other Links

• Time Magazine articles.

• A Motorcyclist's Photo album of Pripyat. There seems to have been some debate as to how "authentic" all this is -- some of the photographs might easily have been taken on guided tours of the area, apparently. Some thoughtful discussion of this, in MaisonBisson.

• For a Google Map of the area, click here. For best results, use the "Satellite view".

• There is a series of FPS computer games by a Ukrainian software developer. For now, I'll link to Wikipedia articles on them: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. Here's the home page for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky.
  • In Arcadia (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) is a game art piece based on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of computer games by Angus Carlyle and Corrado Morgana.