In the wee hours of this morning, 25 years ago, the Chernobyl disaster took place. In the immediate aftermath a city of 50,000 people, the automograd (atom city) of Prypiat, was abandoned and became a ghost town. The actual evacuation of the city took place on the 27th
25 years later, the human population remains zero, and nature is slowly tearing the place down. There is excellent footage of Prypiat filmed five years ago in the History Channel’s “Life After People” documentary. Weeds and winters are slowly tearing down the city – concrete is failing, windows are broken by natural stresses, and it is beginning to look like a scene from Fallout 3 or New Vegas, minus the super mutants (the photo below, of the Palace of Culture, really looks like it is from one of those games rather than a real world city).
Take a beautiful tour of the city here.
Palace of Culture photo by Tim Suess
This is post #22 in the A to Z Blogging Challenge – V is the Vestiges of Prypiat
Dyson's Dodecahedron 
You’re completely right. That looks exactly like something in Fallout 3. Enjoying your posts a lot, especially your hand-drawn maps.
Chernobyl is in Ukrain, not in Russia. Otherwise you have right.
Yeah, I just grabbed the poster from one of the RPG motivational poster sites, didn’t make it myself. Should have looked for one a bit more… Ukrainian.
This place is beautiful and horrifying at the same time. I guess fascinating is the best way to describe it. It’s definitely an inspiration for games as well as writing.
Real life is as weird as any game. If it were Gamma World, the mutation chart would be getting a workout.
As I understand it, the population is not quite zero. A few people have move back, mostly old people who figure they’ll be dead before the radiation poisoning can be a problem. Because that’s the way people are.