Chernobyl catastrophe zone – 4 a long time on: Inside the deserted city reclaimed by nature and sealed off from the world

A frozen world, sealed in time. Earth, as it was known, changed on April 26, 1986, at 1.23am, when the night split open.

Inside Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a routine safety test spiralled into catastrophe.

What followed was the worst nuclear disaster in history. Nearly 50,000 residents of nearby Pripyat were evacuated within hours, many told they would return in a few days. Most never did.

Today, four decades on, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) – a vast, restricted area spanning roughly 2,600sq km – remains one of the most haunting places on Earth.

Nature has crept back in. Forests swallow crumbling tower blocks. Classrooms sit exactly as they were left, with schoolbooks still open, desks still aligned, chalk on the blackboards.

The silence is total, broken only by wind and the distant crackle of Geiger counters. 

And yet, despite the eerie stillness, the zone is not entirely empty. 

The people who refuse to leave the radioactive site, known as the ‘samosely’, are self-settlers who returned illegally to their homes following the catastrophe. 

The Pripyat hospital, where the first firefighters were treated, is among the most contaminated buildings, with abandoned medical equipment and protective gear left behind in the chaos.

Deep inside the power plant complex itself, corridors once bustling with engineers are now dim and heavily controlled, with peeling paint, exposed wiring and lingering radiation hotspots.

The control rooms, once filled with blinking lights and urgent voices, are today eerily silent, preserved as stark reminders of the moment everything went wrong.

They have refused to abandon the land they had lived on for decades.

Most are elderly. Many live without modern utilities, surviving off small-scale farming and supplies brought in from outside.

As of recent counts, fewer than 200 remain, their numbers dwindling with time.

Around 80 per cent of the re-settlers are women, now aged in their 70’s and 80’s. 

Authorities once tried to remove them. Now, they are tolerated – ghosts living among ghosts.

In nearby villages, deserted hospitals and schools loom over the empty streets. They remain untouched since the chaos of the nuclear meltdown.

Inside the abandoned city of Pripyat, the Ferris wheel in the amusement park stands motionless, its yellow carriages rusting in silence, never having carried a single rider after it was due to open just days after the disaster.

Apartment blocks loom like hollow shells, their windows blown out or clouded with grime, while curtains still hang in places, gently shifting with the drafts that move through broken glass.

In kindergartens, rows of tiny metal beds remain neatly arranged, and gas masks are scattered across the floor – haunting relics of preparations that came too late.

Schoolrooms are littered with decaying textbooks, Soviet propaganda posters peeling from the walls, and exercise books still marked with children’s handwriting frozen in time.

In the nearby town of Yaniv, the railway station sits deserted, its platforms empty and tracks overgrown, a silent witness to the mass evacuation that unfolded in hours.

Villages such as Zalissya and Opachychi stand half-reclaimed by woodland, where houses collapse inward, and fruit trees still bloom each spring with no one left to harvest them.

Roads that once connected communities are cracked and warped, with trees forcing their way through the asphalt as nature steadily reclaims the land.

Street signs remain in place, pointing towards towns that no longer function, their names faded but still legible beneath layers of rust and moss.

Inside abandoned shops, shelves lay bare except for the occasional fragment of packaging, a reminder of lives interrupted mid-routine.

Personal belongings – shoes, toys, photographs – are scattered across floors, often exactly where they were left in the rush to evacuate.

The swimming pool in Pripyat, once a hub of activity, remained in use for years after the disaster for cleanup workers, but now sits empty, its tiles cracked and its roof partially collapsed.

In some buildings, Soviet-era murals still cling to the walls, depicting an optimistic future that never came to pass.

Elevators are frozen mid-shaft, stairwells choked with debris, and entire floors have collapsed in places, making many structures dangerously unstable.

Chernobyl’s unfinished giants – two cooling towers – are also visible from miles around.

The large concrete cylinders protrude from the dead ground, strewn with chunks of metal of varying shapes and sizes.

At the very top, four levels of scaffolding cling to the rim. The complex structure has somehow managed to survive despite the years of extreme weather it has endured. 

Yet, far from being completely deserted, life enters the Exclusion Zone on a daily basis.

Around 3,000 workers rotate in and out – engineers, scientists and technicians overseeing the slow dismantling of the ruined reactor and maintaining the vast steel confinement structure that now cages it.

The concrete sarcophagus that entombed Reactor No. 4 is surrounded by the New Safe Confinement (NSC), which houses the containment operations and nuclear waste management conducted by the Ukrainian government.

During the cleanup after the explosion, teams of men called liquidators tested and washed everything inside the Exclusion Zone.

Anything deemed too contaminated to be washed – such as the entire Red Forest, which was given its name as the pine trees absorbed so much radiation they turned red, and all of the houses in the town of Kopachi – were razed and buried beneath the ground instead.

Nobody lives there permanently – except those who chose to return. 

When Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, they did so through the Exclusion Zone surrounding the ruins of Chernobyl. 

The Russian army occupied the immediate area surrounding the defunct plant for over five weeks, causing an estimated $54million in damage to the Exclusion Zone and the New Safe Confinement.

The site of the disaster was a logical base for over 1,000 Russian troops, as the NSC houses electrical operations that connect to Kyiv’s main power grid, and aerial attacks from Ukraine would be unlikely. 

The regular movement of troops and vehicles within the CEZ caused disturbance to the nuclear radiation of the site, stirring up dust and soil that would release more radioactive particles into the air. 

In addition to looting and destroying much of the lab and computer equipment located inside the NSC, the Russian army also cut electrical power to the plant, making the cooling of the deteriorating nuclear material unreliable.

But perhaps the most unsettling legacy of Chernobyl is not the reactor, nor the ruins, but the animals left behind.

When residents fled in 1986, they were forced to abandon their pets. Many were later culled to prevent the spread of contamination.

But some survived, and their descendants still roam the zone today.

There are now hundreds of semi-feral dogs living among the ruins, clustered around the power plant, checkpoints and abandoned towns.

Stories of mutant dogs have become Chernobyl folklore, images of glowing eyes, twisted bodies, animals warped by radiation.

The reality is more complex, and in many ways, more unsettling.

Studies have found that these dogs are genetically distinct from populations outside the zone, shaped by isolation, inbreeding and environmental pressure.

Some show signs of evolutionary change – genes linked to DNA repair and survival in harsh conditions – but scientists are cautious. 

There is no clear evidence of dramatic radiation-driven mutations in the way popular myth suggests.

Instead, what is happening is slower and quieter – natural selection at work in one of the most contaminated environments on Earth.

Even the viral images of blue dogs seen in recent years were not the result of radiation, but likely caused by chemicals they had rolled in. 

Still, the idea lingers as Chernobyl feels like the kind of place where such things should exist.  

The exclusion zone has become an accidental experiment. With humans gone, ecosystems have rebounded. Yet radiation remains embedded in the soil, in the water, in the very fabric of the landscape.

The area behind the power plant, called the ‘Red Forest’ is one of the most radioactive places on Earth. 

Some estimates suggest part of the Exclusion Zone may remain unsafe for hundreds to thousands of years.

But animals live, breed and die here regardless.

The dogs – descendants of abandoned pets – are perhaps the most poignant symbol of that contradiction. Life persists in a place defined by catastrophe.   

Next Sunday marks another year since the explosion that changed everything.

Chernobyl is no longer just a disaster site. It is a warning, a wilderness, a graveyard – and strangely, a refuge.

A place where humans vanished, but life did not.