Pripyat amusement park

The amusement park in Pripyat is probably the most photographed fairground that never properly worked. It was built in the centre of the Soviet atomic city, next to the Palace of Culture, and was due to open on 1 May 1986 as part of the May Day festivities. On 26 April reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, about 3 km from the town, exploded, and the next day Pripyat's population of nearly 50,000 was evacuated. Stories that the rides were switched on for a few hours on 27 April to lift people's spirits circulate widely, but no reliable evidence has been found to support them.

The equipment is modest by any standard: a Ferris wheel about 26 m tall, bumper cars, swing boats and a small paratrooper ride, all standard products of a Soviet manufacturer in Yeysk. What makes the place memorable is the setting. Forest has grown through the square, the paint is peeling from the gondolas, and the idle wheel against the empty apartment blocks has become the image most people associate with the disaster, reproduced in films, documentaries and video games. Radiation readings vary sharply across the site, and a few spots in the park are among the most contaminated in the whole town.

The park became a standard stop on guided day trips into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which were the only legal way in.

Getting there

Pripyat lies inside the Exclusion Zone in northern Ukraine. The workers' town of Slavutych is about 48 km away in a straight line, but visits have always been organised from Kyiv, roughly 110 km south of the main Dytiatky checkpoint, on a tour that takes about two hours each way by road. The nearest airport by distance is Gomel (GME) in Belarus, about 140 km away, which is not a practical route. Travellers usually reach Kyiv by train, most often from Poland.