• Travel, Tourism & Hospitality ›

Leisure Travel

Number of tourists in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone 2017-2021

Number of tourists visiting the chernobyl exclusion zone in ukraine from 2017 to 2021.

Additional Information

Show sources information Show publisher information Use Ask Statista Research Service

January 2022

2017 to 2021

The figures have been manually calculated as the sum of the number of visitors in each month, which was provided by the source.

Other statistics on the topic

Travel, Tourism & Hospitality

Travel and tourism: share of global GDP 2019-2033

COVID-19: job loss in travel and tourism worldwide 2020-2022, by region

Food & Drink Services

Daily year-on-year impact of COVID-19 on global restaurant dining 2020-2022

Revenue of leading OTAs worldwide 2019-2022

  • Immediate access to statistics, forecasts & reports
  • Usage and publication rights
  • Download in various formats

You only have access to basic statistics.

  • Instant access  to 1m statistics
  • Download  in XLS, PDF & PNG format
  • Detailed  references

Business Solutions including all features.

Other statistics that may interest you

  • Tourists distributed by province Andalusia 2021
  • Quarterly tourism spending in the Canary Islands 2019-2022
  • Canary Islands: quarterly spending by British tourists 2018-2020
  • Canary Islands: quarterly spending by German tourists 2018-2020
  • Canary Islands: main countries of origin of direct international flights 2020
  • Number of hotel overnight stays in Madrid (Spain) 2016-2019, by origin of tourists
  • Madrid: number of nights spent in hotels per month in 2019
  • Main inbound tourism markets for the city of Madrid 2022
  • Passengers on international flights to Mallorca (Spain) in 2019
  • Main inbound tourism markets for Madrid (Spain) in 2016, based on overnight stays
  • Outbound tourism departures from Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Tourist accommodation establishments in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Number of hotels and similar accommodation in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Number of hotel rooms in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Number of hotel bed-places in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Occupancy rate of hotel bed-places in Ukraine 2012-2020
  • Average length of stay in hotel accommodation in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Available capacity of hotels in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Inbound tourism for personal purposes in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Inbound tourism in Ukraine 2011-2020, by organization of trip
  • Countries with the highest number of inbound tourist arrivals worldwide 2019-2022
  • Number of visitors to the U.S. from China 2005-2025
  • Number of overnight stays of Chinese tourists in Finland and Sweden 2008-2017
  • International tourism receipts in Norway 2019-2033
  • Japanese earthquake recovery: public opinion on government's handling
  • Ranking of the ten most visited countries in the world in 2014
  • Italy: daily expenditure of foreign tourists in 2016, by country of origin
  • International tourist expenditure in Estonia 2012-2028
  • International tourist expenditure in Finland 2012-2028
  • International tourism spending in Germany 2012-2028
  • International tourism spending in Croatia 2012-2028
  • International tourism spending in Russia 2011-2022
  • Leading source markets for travel to Russia 2020-2022, by arrivals
  • Number of Russian tourist trips to Tanzania 2017-2022
  • Tourism intensity in Slovenia 2010-2021
  • Tourism intensity in Montenegro 2010-2021
  • Tourism intensity in Azerbaijan 2010-2020
  • Domestic travel spending in Russia 2019-2022
  • International tourists arrivals in Slovenia 2010-2022
  • Number of inbound tourist arrivals in Russia 2014-2022
  • Tourists growth in Russia 2019-2021, by season and destination

Other statistics that may interest you Statistics on

About the industry

  • Premium Statistic Tourists distributed by province Andalusia 2021
  • Premium Statistic Quarterly tourism spending in the Canary Islands 2019-2022
  • Premium Statistic Canary Islands: quarterly spending by British tourists 2018-2020
  • Premium Statistic Canary Islands: quarterly spending by German tourists 2018-2020
  • Basic Statistic Canary Islands: main countries of origin of direct international flights 2020
  • Premium Statistic Number of hotel overnight stays in Madrid (Spain) 2016-2019, by origin of tourists
  • Premium Statistic Madrid: number of nights spent in hotels per month in 2019
  • Premium Statistic Main inbound tourism markets for the city of Madrid 2022
  • Basic Statistic Passengers on international flights to Mallorca (Spain) in 2019
  • Premium Statistic Main inbound tourism markets for Madrid (Spain) in 2016, based on overnight stays

About the region

  • Premium Statistic Outbound tourism departures from Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Tourist accommodation establishments in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Number of hotels and similar accommodation in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Number of hotel rooms in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Number of hotel bed-places in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Occupancy rate of hotel bed-places in Ukraine 2012-2020
  • Premium Statistic Average length of stay in hotel accommodation in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Available capacity of hotels in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Inbound tourism for personal purposes in Ukraine 2010-2020
  • Premium Statistic Inbound tourism in Ukraine 2011-2020, by organization of trip

Selected statistics

  • Premium Statistic Countries with the highest number of inbound tourist arrivals worldwide 2019-2022

Other regions

  • Premium Statistic Number of visitors to the U.S. from China 2005-2025
  • Premium Statistic Number of overnight stays of Chinese tourists in Finland and Sweden 2008-2017
  • Basic Statistic International tourism receipts in Norway 2019-2033
  • Premium Statistic Japanese earthquake recovery: public opinion on government's handling
  • Premium Statistic Ranking of the ten most visited countries in the world in 2014
  • Premium Statistic Italy: daily expenditure of foreign tourists in 2016, by country of origin
  • Basic Statistic International tourist expenditure in Estonia 2012-2028
  • Basic Statistic International tourist expenditure in Finland 2012-2028
  • Basic Statistic International tourism spending in Germany 2012-2028
  • Basic Statistic International tourism spending in Croatia 2012-2028

Related statistics

  • Basic Statistic International tourism spending in Russia 2011-2022
  • Premium Statistic Leading source markets for travel to Russia 2020-2022, by arrivals
  • Premium Statistic Number of Russian tourist trips to Tanzania 2017-2022
  • Premium Statistic Tourism intensity in Slovenia 2010-2021
  • Premium Statistic Tourism intensity in Montenegro 2010-2021
  • Premium Statistic Tourism intensity in Azerbaijan 2010-2020
  • Basic Statistic Domestic travel spending in Russia 2019-2022
  • Basic Statistic International tourists arrivals in Slovenia 2010-2022
  • Premium Statistic Number of inbound tourist arrivals in Russia 2014-2022
  • Premium Statistic Tourists growth in Russia 2019-2021, by season and destination

Further related statistics

  • Premium Statistic International tourist arrivals in Europe 2006-2023
  • Basic Statistic Foreign exchange earnings from tourism in India 2000-2022
  • Premium Statistic Change in number of visitors from Mexico to the U.S. 2018-2024
  • Premium Statistic Music tourist spending at concerts and festivals in the United Kingdom (UK) 2012-2016
  • Basic Statistic Number of international tourist arrivals in India 2010-2021
  • Basic Statistic Contribution of China's travel and tourism industry to GDP 2014-2023
  • Premium Statistic National park visitor spending in the U.S. 2012-2021, by category
  • Premium Statistic Economic contribution of national park visitor spending in the U.S. 2012-2021
  • Premium Statistic Number of visitors to the U.S. from Russia 2011-2022
  • Premium Statistic Number of international tourist arrivals APAC 2019, by country or region

Further Content: You might find this interesting as well

  • International tourist arrivals in Europe 2006-2023
  • Foreign exchange earnings from tourism in India 2000-2022
  • Change in number of visitors from Mexico to the U.S. 2018-2024
  • Music tourist spending at concerts and festivals in the United Kingdom (UK) 2012-2016
  • Number of international tourist arrivals in India 2010-2021
  • Contribution of China's travel and tourism industry to GDP 2014-2023
  • National park visitor spending in the U.S. 2012-2021, by category
  • Economic contribution of national park visitor spending in the U.S. 2012-2021
  • Number of visitors to the U.S. from Russia 2011-2022
  • Number of international tourist arrivals APAC 2019, by country or region

Why Would Anyone Want to Visit Chernobyl?

By Mark O’Connell March 24, 2020

  • Share full article

Maybe they’re looking for a glimpse of the apocalypse.

By Mark O’Connell

We were around a hundred miles from the Zone, and already my thoughts had turned toward death. This had nothing to do with radiation and everything to do with road safety. I was in a minibus, on a highway between Kyiv and the 1,160-square-mile Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl power plant. The minibus was being driven at an alarming speed and in such a way that caused me to question the safety standards of the tour company I’d entrusted myself to for the next two days. It had become clear that our driver and tour guide, a man in his early 40s named Igor, was engaged in a suite of tasks that were not merely beyond the normal remit of minibus driving but in fact in direct conflict with it. He was holding a clipboard and spreadsheet on top of the steering wheel with his left hand (that he was also using to steer), while in his other hand he held a smartphone, into which he was diligently transferring data from the spreadsheet. The roughly two-hour journey from Kyiv to the Zone was, clearly, a period of downtime of which he intended to take advantage in order to get some work squared away before the proper commencement of the tour. As such, he appeared to be distributing his attention in a tripartite pattern — clipboard, road, phone; clipboard, road, phone — looking up from his work every few seconds in order to satisfy himself that things were basically in order on the road, before returning his attention to the clipboard.

I happened to be sitting up front with Igor and with his young colleague Vika, who was training to become a fully accredited guide. Vika appeared to be reading the Wikipedia article for “nuclear reactor” on her iPhone. I considered suggesting to Igor that Vika might be in a position to take on the spreadsheet work, which would allow him to commit himself in earnest to the task of driving, but I held my counsel for fear that such a suggestion might seem rude. I craned around in an effort to make subtly appalled eye contact with my friend Dylan, who was sitting a few rows back alongside a couple of guys in their 20s — an Australian and a Canadian who, we later learned, were traveling around the continent together impelled by a desire to have sex with a woman from every European nation — but he didn’t look up, preoccupied as he was with a flurry of incoming emails. Some long-fugitive deal, I understood, was now on the verge of lucrative fruition.

Of all my friends, I knew that Dylan was most likely to accept at short notice my request for accompaniment on a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He was his own boss, for one thing, and he was not short of money (tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist). He was also in the midst of a divorce, amicable but nonetheless complex in its practicalities. It would, I said, be a kind of anti-stag party: His marriage was ending, and I was dragging him to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for two days. As soon as I made it, I felt some discomfort about this joke, with its laddish overtones, as though I were proposing the trip for the laughs or as an exploit in extreme tourism or, worse still, some kind of stunt journalism enterprise combining elements of both. I was keen to avoid seeing myself in this way.

“Lunch,” Igor said, pointing out the side window of the bus. I followed the upward angle of his index finger and saw a series of telephone poles, each of which had a stork nesting atop it. “Lunch,” he reiterated, this time to a vague ripple of courteous laughter.

About 40 minutes north of Kyiv, a screen flickered to life in front of us and began to play a documentary about the Chernobyl disaster. We watched in silence as our minibus progressed from the margins of the city to the countryside. The video was intended as a primer, so that by the time we got to the site of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, everyone would be up to speed on the basic facts: how in the early hours of April 26, 1986, a safety test simulating the effects of a power failure ended in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction; how this caused an inferno in the reactor core that burned for at least nine days; how in the aftermath the Soviet government created a 19-mile-radius exclusion zone around the power plant; how they evacuated about 130,000 people, more than 40,000 of them residents of Pripyat, a “city of the future” built for workers at the nearby plant; how the vast endeavor of decontamination necessitated the bulldozing of entire towns, the felling of entire forests, the burying of them deep in the poisoned earth.

As the documentary played on the screen, Igor demonstrated his familiarity with it by reciting lines along with the film. At one point, Mikhail Gorbachev materialized to deliver a monologue on the terrifying time scale of the accident’s aftereffects. His data entry tasks now complete, Igor spoke along in unison with Gorbachev — “How many years is this going to go on? Eight hundred years?” — before himself proclaiming, “Yes! Until the second Jesus is born!”

I was unsure what to make of the tone of all this. Igor and Vika’s inscrutable jocularity sat oddly with the task they were charged with: to guide us around the site of arguably the worst ecological catastrophe in history, a source of fathomless human suffering in our own lifetimes. And yet some measure of levity seemed to be required of us.

After the documentary, the minibus’s onboard infotainment programming moved on to an episode of the BBC motoring show “Top Gear,” in which three chortling idiots drove around the Exclusion Zone in hatchbacks, gazing at clicking Geiger counters while ominous electronica played on the soundtrack. There were then some low-budget music videos, all of which featured more or less similar scenes of dour young men — a touchingly earnest British rapper, some kind of American Christian metal outfit — lip-syncing against the ruined spectacle of Pripyat.

I wondered what, if anything, the tour company’s intention might have been in showing us all this content. Screening the documentary made sense, in that it was straightforwardly informative — the circumstances of the accident, the staggering magnitude of the cleanup operation, the inconceivable time scale of the aftereffects and so on. But the “Top Gear” scenes and the music videos were much more unsettling to watch, because they laid bare the ease with which the Zone, and in particular the evacuated city of Pripyat, could be used, in fact exploited, as the setting for a kind of anti-tourism, as a deep source of dramatic, and at the same time entirely generic, apocalyptic imagery.

I was being confronted, I realized, with an exaggerated manifestation of my own disquiet about making this trip in the first place; these unseemly, even pornographic, depictions of the Zone were on a continuum with my own reasons for making this trip. My anxieties about the future — the likely disastrous effects of climate change, our vulnerability to all manner of unthinkable catastrophes — had for some time been channeled into an obsession with the idea of “the apocalypse,” with the various ways people envisioned, and prepared for, civilizational collapse.

I was on a kind of perverse pilgrimage: I wanted to see what the end of the world looked like. I wanted to haunt its ruins and be haunted by them. I wanted to see what could not otherwise be seen, to inspect the remains of the human era. The Zone presented this prospect in a manner more clear and stark than any other place I was aware of. It seemed to me that to travel there would be to look upon the end of the world from the vantage point of its aftermath. It was my understanding, my conceit, that I was catching a glimpse of the future. I did not then understand that this future, or something like it, was closer than it appeared at the time. I did not understand that before long the idea of the Zone would advance outward from the realm of abstraction to encompass my experience of everyday life, that cities across the developed world would be locked down in an effort to suppress the spread of a lethal new virus, an enemy as invisible and insidious in its way as radiation and as capable of hollowing out the substance of society overnight.

The minibus slowed as we approached the checkpoint marking the outer perimeter of the Zone. Two policemen emerged from a small building, languidly smoking, emanating the peculiar lassitude of armed border guards. Igor reached out and plucked the microphone from its nook in the dashboard.

“Dear comrades,” he said. “We are now approaching the Zone. Please hand over passports for inspection.”

You feel immediately the force of the contradiction. You feel, contradictorily, both drawn in and repelled by this force. Everything you have learned tells you that this is an afflicted place, a place that is hostile and dangerous to life. And yet the dosimeter, which Igor held up for inspection as we stood by the bus on the far side of the border, displayed a level of radiation lower than the one recorded outside the McDonald’s in Kyiv where we had boarded the bus earlier that morning. Apart from some hot spots, much of the Zone has relatively low levels of contamination. The outer part of the 30 Kilometer Zone — the radius of abandoned land around the reactor itself — is hardly a barren hellscape.

“Possible to use this part of Zone again, humans today,” Igor said.

Someone asked why, in that case, it wasn’t used.

“Ukraine is very big country. Luckily we can spare this land to use as buffer between highly contaminated part of Zone and rest of Ukraine. Belarus not so lucky.”

Immediately you are struck by the strange beauty of the place, the unchecked exuberance of nature finally set free of its crowning achievement, its problem child. And everywhere you look, you are reminded of how artificial the distinction is between the human and the natural world: that everything we do, even our destruction of nature, exists within the context of nature. The road you walk on is fissured with the purposeful pressure of plant stems from below, the heedless insistence of life breaking forth, continuing on. It is midsummer, and the day is hot but with the sibilant whisper of a cool breeze in the leaves and butterflies everywhere, superintending the ruins. It is all quite lovely, in its uncanny way: The world, everywhere, protesting its innocence.

“All the fields are slowly turning into forest,” Igor said. “The condition of nature is returning to what it was before people. Mooses. Wild boar. Wolves. Rare kinds of horses.”

This is the colossal irony of Chernobyl: Because it is the site of an enormous ecological catastrophe, this region has been for decades now basically void of human life; and because it is basically void of human life, it is effectively a vast nature preserve. To enter the Zone, in this sense, is to have one foot in a prelapsarian paradise and the other in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

Not far past the border, we stopped and walked a little way into a wooded area that had once been a village. We paused in a clearing to observe a large skull, a scattered miscellany of bones.

“Moose,” Igor said, prodding the skull gently with the toe of a sneaker. “Skull of moose,” he added, by way of elaboration.

Vika directed our attention toward a low building with a collapsed roof, a fallen tree partly obscuring its entrance. She swept a hand before her in a stagy flourish. “It is a hot day today,” she said. “Who would like to buy an ice cream?” She went on to clarify that this had once been a shop, in which it would have been possible to buy ice cream, among other items. Three decades is a long time, of course, but it was still impressive how comprehensively nature had seized control of the place in that time. In these ruins, it was no easier to imagine people standing around in jeans and sneakers eating ice cream than it would be in the blasted avenues of Pompeii to imagine people in togas eating olives. It was astonishing to behold how quickly we humans became irrelevant to the business of nature.

And this flourishing of the wilderness was at the expense of the decay of man-made things. Strictly speaking, visitors are forbidden to enter any of Pripyat’s buildings, many of which are in variously advanced states of decay and structural peril, some clearly ready to collapse at any moment. Igor and Vika could in theory lose their licenses to enter the Zone if they were caught taking tourists into buildings. It had been known to happen, Igor said, that guides had their permits revoked. This had put them in something of a double bind, he explained, on account of the proliferation in recent years of rival outfits offering trips to the Zone. If they didn’t take customers into the buildings — up the stairways to the rooftops, into the former homes and workplaces and schoolrooms of Pripyat — some other guides would, and what people wanted more than anything in visiting the place was to enter the intimate spaces of an abandoned world.

One of the Swedish men who accounted for about a third of the group’s number asked whether any visitors had been seriously injured or killed while exploring the abandoned buildings.

“Not yet,” Igor said, a reply more ominous than he may have intended.

He went on to clarify that the fate of the small but thriving tourism business hung in the balance and depended, by consensus, on the nationality of the first person to be injured or killed on a tour. If a Ukrainian died while exploring one of the buildings, he said, fine, no problem, business as usual. If a European, then the police would have to immediately clamp down on tour guides bringing people into buildings. But the worst-case scenario was, of course, an American getting killed or seriously injured. That, he quipped, would mean an immediate cessation of the whole enterprise.

“American gets hurt,” he said, “no more tours in Zone. Finished.”

The tour made its way to the edge of the city and to the abandoned fairground we’d seen on the minibus that morning — on the “Top Gear” segment and the music videos. This was Pripyat’s most recognizable landmark, its most readily legible symbol of decayed utopia. Our little group wandered around the fairground, taking in the cinematic vista of catastrophe: the Ferris wheel, the unused bumper cars overgrown with moss, the swing boats half-decayed by rust.

The park’s grand opening, Vika said, had been scheduled for the International Workers’ Day celebrations on May 1, 1986, the week following the disaster, and the park had therefore never actually been used. Beside her, Igor held aloft the dosimeter, explaining that the radiation levels were by and large quite safe, but that certain small areas within the fairground were high: the moss on the bumper cars, for example, contained a complex cocktail of toxic substances, having absorbed and retained more radiation than surrounding surfaces. Though I can’t say I considered it, moss in general was not to be ingested; the same was true of all kinds of fungi, for their spongelike assimilation of radioactive material. Wild dogs and cats, too, can present a potential risk, because they roamed freely in parts of the Zone that had never been decontaminated effectively, and they carried radioactive particles in their fur.

I leaned against the railings of the bumper car enclosure and then, recalling having read a warning somewhere about the perils of sitting on and leaning against things in the Zone, quickly relocated myself away from the rusting metal. I looked at the others, almost all of whom were engaged in taking photographs of the fairground. The only exception was Dylan, who was on the phone again, apparently talking someone through the game plan for a new investment round. I was struck for the first time by the disproportionate maleness of the group: out of a dozen or so tourists, only one was female, a young German woman who was at present assisting her prodigiously pierced boyfriend in operating a drone for purposes of aerial cinematography.

There seemed to be a general implicit agreement that nobody would appear in anyone else’s shots, because of a mutual interest in the photographic representation of Pripyat as a maximally desolate place, an impression that would inevitably be compromised by the presence of other tourists taking photos in the backgrounds of your own. On a whim, I opened up Instagram on my phone — the 3G coverage in the Zone had, against all expectation, been so far uniformly excellent — and entered “Pripyat” into the search box and then scrolled through a cascading plenitude of aesthetically uniform photos of the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars, the swing boats, along with a great many photos employing these as dramatic backgrounds for selfies. A few of these featured goofy expressions and sexy pouts and bad-ass sneers, but a majority were appropriately solemn or contemplative in attitude. The message, by and large, seemed to be this: I have been here, and I have felt the melancholy weight of this poisoned place.

Pripyat presents the adventurous tourist with a spectacle of abandonment more vivid than anywhere else on Earth, a fever dream of a world gone void. To walk the imposing squares of the planned city, its broad avenues cracked and overgrown with vegetation, is in one sense to wander the ruins of a collapsed utopian project, a vast crumbling monument to an abandoned past. And yet it is also to be thrust forward into an immersive simulation of the future, an image of what will come in our wake. What is most strange about wandering the streets and buildings of this discontinued city is the recognition of the place as an artifact of our own time: It is a vast complex of ruins, like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, but the vision is one of modernity in wretched decay. In wandering the crumbling ruins of the present, you are encountering a world to come.

And this is why the images from my time in Pripyat that cling most insistently to my mind are the fragmented shards of technology, the rotted remnants of our own machine age. In what had once been an electronics store, the soles of our sturdy shoes crunched on the shattered glass of screens, and with our smartphones we captured the disquieting sight of heaped and eviscerated old television sets, of tubes and wires extruded from their gutted shells, and of ancient circuit boards greened with algae. (And surely I cannot have been the only one among us to imagine the smartphone I was holding undergoing its own afterlife of decay and dissolution.) In what had once been a music store, we walked amid a chaos of decomposing pianos, variously wrecked and capsized, and here and there someone fingered the yellowed keys, and the notes sounded strange and damp and discordant. All of this was weighted with the sad intimation of the world’s inevitable decline, the inbuilt obsolescence of our objects, our culture: the realization that what will survive of us is garbage.

Later, outside the entrance to one of Pripyat’s many schools, a small wild dog approached us with disarming deference. Vika opened her handbag and removed a squat pinkish tube, a snack from the lower reaches of the pork-product market, and presented it to the dog, who received it with patience and good grace.

There was a dark flash of movement on the periphery of my field of vision, a rustle of dry leaves. I turned and saw the business end of a muscular black snake as it emerged from beneath a rusted slide and plunged headlong for the undergrowth.

“Viper,” Igor said, nodding in the direction of the fugitive snake. He pronounced it “wiper.”

The school was a large tile-fronted building, on one side of which was a beautiful mosaic of an anthropomorphic sun gazing down at a little girl. Dylan was rightly dubious as to the wisdom of entering a building in such an advanced state of dilapidation. Turning to Igor, he remarked that they must have been constructed hastily and poorly in the first place.

“No,” Igor replied, briskly brushing an insect off the shoulder of his camouflage jacket. “This is future for all buildings.”

The school’s foyer was carpeted with thousands of textbooks and copybooks, a sprawling detritus of the written word. It felt somehow obscene to walk on these pages, but there was no way to avoid it if you wanted to move forward. Igor bent down to pick up a colorfully illustrated storybook from the ground and flipped through its desiccated pages.

“Propaganda book,” he said, with a moue of mild distaste, and dropped it gently again at his feet. “In Soviet Union, everything was propaganda. All the time, propaganda.”

I asked him what he himself remembered of the disaster, and he answered that there was basically nothing to remember. Though he was five years older than me, he said that I would most likely have a clearer memory of the accident and its aftermath, because in Soviet Ukraine little information was made public about the scale of the catastrophe. “In Europe? Panic. Huge disaster. In Ukraine? No problem.”

Climbing the staircase, whose railings had long since been removed, I trailed a hand against a wall to steady myself and felt the splintering paint work beneath my fingertips. I was 6 when the disaster happened, young enough, I suppose, to have been protected by my parents from the news and its implications. What did I recall of the time? Weird births, human bodies distorted beyond nature, ballooned skulls, clawed and misshapen limbs: images not of the disaster itself but of its long and desolate and uncanny aftermath. I remembered a feeling of fascinated horror, which was bound up in my mind with communism and democracy and the quarrel I only understood as the struggle between good and evil, and with the idea of nuclear war, and with other catastrophes of the time, too, the sense of a miscarried future.

As I continued up the stairs, a memory came to me of a country road late at night, of my mother helping me up onto the hood of our orange Ford Fiesta, directing my attention toward a point of light arcing swiftly across the clear night sky, and of her telling me that it was an American space shuttle called Challenger, orbiting the planet. That memory was linked in my mind with a later memory, of watching television news footage of that same shuttle exploding into pure white vapor over the ocean. The vision of the sudden Y-shaped divergence of the contrails, spiraling again toward each other as the exploded remains of the shuttle fell to the sea, a debris of technology and death, striking against the deep blue sky. That moment was for me what the moon landing was for my parents and their generation: an image in which the future itself was fixed.

We rounded the top of the stairs, and as I set off down a corridor after Igor, I realized that those images of technological disaster, of explosions, mutations, had haunted my childhood and that I had arrived at the source of a catastrophe much larger than Chernobyl itself or any of its vague immensity of effects. I remembered a line from the French philosopher Paul Virilio — “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck” — that seemed to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe. And it occurred to me that Pripyat was a graveyard of progress, the final resting place of the future.

In a large upstairs classroom, a dozen or so toddler-size chairs were arranged in a circle, and on each was perched a rotting doll or threadbare teddy bear. The visual effect was eerie enough, but what was properly unsettling was the realization that this scene had been carefully arranged by a visitor, probably quite recently, precisely in order for it to be photographed. And this went to the heart of what I found so profoundly creepy about the whole enterprise of catastrophe tourism, an enterprise in which I myself was just as implicated as anyone else who was standing here in this former classroom, feeling the warm breeze stirring the air through the empty window frames.

I wondered whether Igor and Vika held us in contempt, us Western Europeans and Australians and North Americans who had forked over a fee not much lower than Ukraine’s average monthly wage for a two-day tour around this discontinued world, to feel the transgressive thrill of our own daring in coming here. If it were I in their position, I knew that contempt is exactly what I would have felt. The fact was that I didn’t even need to leave my own position in order to hold myself in contempt, or anyone else.

“How often do you come here?” I asked Igor.

“Seven days a week, usually,” he said. He had a strange way of avoiding eye contact, of looking not directly at you but at a slight angle, as though you were in fact beside yourself. “Seven days a week, eight years.”

“How has that affected you?” I asked.

“I have three children. No mutants.”

“I don’t mean the radiation so much as just the place. I mean, all this must have an impact,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward my own head, indicating matters broadly psychological.

“I don’t see my wife. My family. I get up at 6:30 a.m., they are asleep. I get home late night, already they are asleep again. I am a slave, just like in Soviet Union time. But now,” he said, with an air of inscrutable sarcasm, “I am a slave to money.”

I followed Igor and Vika into another classroom, where we were joined by the wild dog Vika had fed earlier. The dog did a quick circuit of the room, sniffed perfunctorily at a papier-mâché doll, an upturned chair, some torn copybook pages, then settled himself down beside Vika. Igor opened a cupboard and removed a stack of paintings, spread them out on a table flaked with aquamarine paint. The pictures were beautifully childish things, heartbreakingly vivid renderings of butterflies, grinning suns, fish, chickens, dinosaurs, a piglet in a little blue dress. They were expressions of love toward the world, toward nature, made with such obvious joy and care that I felt myself getting emotional looking at them. I could all of a sudden see the children at their desks, their tongues protruding in concentration, their teachers bending over to offer encouragement and praise, and I could smell the paper, the paint, the glue.

I picked up a painting of a dinosaur, and I was surprised by sadness not at the unthinkable dimensions of the catastrophe itself but at the thought that the child responsible for this picture was never able to take it home to show his parents; how instead, he had to leave it behind just as he had to leave behind his school, his home, his city, his poisoned world. And I became conscious then of the strangeness of my being here, the wrongness of myself as a figure in this scene: a man from outside, from the postapocalyptic future, holding this simple and beautiful picture in his hand and looking at it as an artifact of a collapsed civilization. This, I now understood, was the deeper contradiction of my presence in the Zone: My discomfort in being here had less to do with the risk of contamination than with the sense of myself as the contaminant.

The tour company had put us up in the town of Chernobyl itself, in a place called Hotel 10 — a name so blankly utilitarian that it sounded chic. Hotel 10 was in reality no more chic than you would expect a hotel in Chernobyl to be and arguably even less so. It looked like, and essentially was, a gigantic two-story shipping container. Its exterior walls and roof were corrugated iron. Internally it seemed to be constructed entirely from drywall, and it smelled faintly of creosote throughout, and the long corridor sloped at a nauseating angle on its final descent toward the room Dylan and I were sharing on the ground floor.

The Ukrainian government imposes a strict 8 p.m. curfew in the Zone, and so after a dinner of borscht, bread and unspecified meats, there was nothing to do but drink, and so we drank. We drank an absurdly overpriced local beer called Chernobyl — the hotel had run out of everything else — that the label assured us was brewed outside the Zone, using nonlocal wheat and water, specifically for consumption inside the Zone itself, a business model that Dylan rightly condemned as needlessly self-limiting.

We all turned in early that night. Even if we’d wanted to walk the empty streets of the town after dark, we would have been breaking the law in doing so and possibly jeopardizing the tour company’s license to bring tourists to the Zone. Unable to sleep, I took out the book I brought with me, an oral history of the disaster and its aftermath called “Chernobyl Prayer,” by the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich. As I reached the closing pages, after dozens of monologues about the loss and displacement and terror endured by the people of Chernobyl, I was unsettled to encounter an image of myself. The book’s coda was a composite of 2005 newspaper clippings about the news that a Kyiv travel agency was beginning to offer people the chance to visit the Exclusion Zone.

“You are certainly going to have something to tell your friends about when you get back home,” I read. “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.”

I lay awake for some time, trying to attend to the silence, hearing now and then the faint howling of wolves in the lonely distance. Had I myself, I wondered, come here in search of strong new sensations? There was, I realized, a sense in which I was encountering the Zone less as the site of a real catastrophe, a barely conceivable tragedy of the very recent past, than as a vast diorama of an imagined future, a world in which humans had ceased entirely to exist.

Among ruins, Pripyat is a special case. It’s Venice in reverse: a fully interactive virtual rendering of a world to come. The place is recognizably of our own time and yet entirely other. It was built as an exemplary creation of Soviet planning and ingenuity, an ideal place for a highly skilled work force. Broad avenues lined with evergreen trees, sprawling city squares, modernist high-rise apartment buildings, hotels, places for exercise and entertainment, cultural centers, playgrounds. And all of it was powered by the alchemy of nuclear energy. The people who designed and built Pripyat believed themselves to be designing and building the future. This was a historical paradox almost too painful to contemplate.

It wasn’t until after I returned home from Ukraine that I began to imagine my own house a ruin, to picture as I walked through its rooms the effect 30 years of dereliction might wreak on my son’s bedroom, imagining his soft toys matted and splayed to the elements, the bare frame of his bed collapsed in a moldering heap, the floorboards stripped and rotted. I would walk out our front door and imagine our street deserted, the empty window frames of the houses and shops, trees sprouting through the cracked sidewalks, the road itself overgrown with grass.

Now I find myself wanting not to think about abandoned streets and shuttered schools and empty playgrounds any more than I have to, which is all the time. One recent evening, a few days into pandemic-mandated social distancing, I went out for a walk around my neighborhood — a densely populated community in Dublin’s inner city — and it was sadder and more uncanny than I was prepared for. It was not the Zone, but neither was it the world I knew. I thought of a line from “Chernobyl Prayer” that haunted me for a time after I read it but had not occurred to me since: “Something from the future is peeking out and it’s just too big for our minds.” I walked for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hardly encountered another soul.

At the heart of the Zone is Reactor No. 4. You don’t see it. Not now that it is enclosed in the immense dome known as the New Safe Confinement. This, they say, is the largest movable object on the planet: roughly 360 feet tall at its apex and 840 feet wide. The dome was the result of a vast engineering project involving 27 countries. The construction had been completed on-site, and in November 2016 the finished dome was slid into position on rails, over the original shelter, which it now entirely contained. That original shelter, known variously as the Sarcophagus and the Shelter Object, had been hastily constructed over the ruins of the reactor building in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

The group stood looking at the dome taking photos of the plant for later Instagram sharing, as Igor talked us dryly through the stats.

“Sarcophagus is an interesting word to have gone with,” Dylan said, trousering his phone.

“It really is,” I said. “They have not shied away from the sinister.”

Zone. Shelter Object. Sarcophagus. There was an archetypal charge to these terms, a resonance of the uncanny on the surfaces of the words themselves. Sarcophagus, from the Greek, sark meaning flesh; phagus meaning to eat.

A couple of hundred yards from us was an accretion of fissile material that had melted through the concrete floor of the reactor building to the basement beneath, cooled and hardened into a monstrous mass they called the Elephant’s Foot. This was the holy of holies, possibly the most toxic object on the planet. This was the center of the Zone. To be in its presence even briefly was extremely dangerous. An hour of close proximity would be lethal. Concealed though it was, its unseen presence emanated a shimmer of the numinous. It was the nightmare consequence of technology itself, the invention of the shipwreck.

In the closing stretch of the Bible, in Revelation, appear these lines: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” Wormwood is a shrub that appears several times in the Bible, invoked in Revelation as a sort of curse, perhaps the wrath of a vengeful God. In fact, Chernobyl is named for the plant, which grows in lavish abundance in the region. This matter of linguistic curiosity is frequently raised in commentaries on the accident and its apocalyptic resonances.

Laborers in construction hats ambled in and out of the plant. It was lunchtime. The cleanup was ongoing. This was a place of work, an ordinary place. But it was a kind of holy place too, a place where all of time had collapsed into a single physical point. The Elephant’s Foot would be here always. It would remain here after the death of everything else, an eternal monument to our civilization. After the collapse of every other structure, after every good and beautiful thing had been lost and forgotten, its silent malice would still be throbbing in the ground like a cancer, spreading its bitterness through the risen waters.

Before returning to Kyiv, we made a final stop at the Reactor No. 5 cooling tower, a lofty abyss of concrete that was nearing completion at the time of the accident and had lain abandoned ever since, both construction site and ruin. We walked through tall grass and across a long footbridge whose wooden slats had rotted away so completely in places that we had to cling to railings and tiptoe along rusted metal sidings.

Once inside, we wandered the interior, mutely assimilating the immensity of the structure. The tower ascended some 500 feet into the air, to a vast opening that encircled the sky. Someone in the group selected a rock from the ground and pitched it with impressive accuracy and force at a large iron pipe that ran across the tower’s interior, and the clang reverberated in what seemed an endless self-perpetuating loop. Somewhere up in the lofty reaches a crow delivered itself of a cracked screech, and this sound echoed lengthily in its turn.

The more adventurous of us clambered up the iron beams of the scaffolding in search of more lofty positions from which to photograph the scene. I was not among them. I sought the lower ground, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, having forgotten for a moment the obvious danger of doing so. I looked up. Hundreds of feet overhead, two birds were gliding in opposing spirals around the inner circumference of the tower, kestrels I thought, drifting upward on unseen currents toward the vast disk of sky, impossibly deep and blue. I sat there watching them a long time, circling and circling inside the great cone of the tower. I laughed, thinking of the Yeatsian resonances of the scene, the millenarian mysticism: the tower, the falcons, the widening gyres. But there was in truth nothing apocalyptic about what I was seeing, no blood-dimmed tide. It was an aftermath, a calm restored.

These birds, I thought, could have known nothing about this place. The Zone did not exist for them. Or rather, they knew it intimately and absolutely, but their understanding had nothing in common with ours. This cooling tower, unthinkable monument that it was to the subjugation of nature, was not distinguished from the trees, the mountains, the other lonely structures on the land. There was no division between human and nonhuman for these spiraling ghosts of the sky. There was only nature. Only the world remained and the things that were in it.

  • Travel in a Plague Year

This article is adapted from the book “Notes From an Apocalypse,” to be published by Doubleday in April. Mark O’Connell is a writer based in Dublin. His first book, “To Be a Machine,” was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He previously wrote a feature article about a presidential candidate running on a platform of eradicating death.

  • Tourism at the End of the World
  • Learning to Swim

Advertisement

chernobyl tourism statistics

35 years since its nuclear disaster, Chernobyl prepares for tourist influx

The rusty emblem of the Soviet Union is seen over the ghost town of Pripyat close to the Chernobyl nuclear plant, Ukraine, Thursday, April 15, 2021.

Ukraine's authorities hope that Chernobyl can be a monument not just to human error, but the ability to move on.

In the 35 years since the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the nearby main thoroughfare in Pripyat, Ukraine, has been taken over by plants, trees and wildlife.

Abandoned hours after the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor in 1986, the town that once housed workers of the nuclear plant and their families has existed ever since as an eerie ghost town.

But now its central boulevard has been cleared of trees and shrubs, and even reconnected to the electricity grid. In 2020, the former residents of this once-thriving town visited it for the first time to mark five decades since it was first established in the then-Soviet Union.

While only a trickle of hardy tourists have made their way to Chernobyl and its environs over the last decade, the Ukrainian authorities believe this could soon turn into a stream - if not a flood.

HBO mini-series

Public awareness of what happened at Chernobyl 35 years ago on April 26 has been heightened by a popular and critically-acclaimed HBO mini-series about the disaster and its aftermath.

Mass tourism would not only help to keep the events of Chernobyl alive, the Ukrainian authorities believe, but also bring in cash to help with further restoration work.

As well as the restoration in Pripyat, the government plans a new museum showcasing rescue equipment used during the clean-up more than three decades ago.

In the aftermath of the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster, some 350,000 people were relocated from the region surrounding Chernobyl. A new town, Slavutich, was established to house plant workers and scientists around 30km from the site of the explosion.

But the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone remains a vast, empty monument to the massive human errors committed by the Soviet authorities 35 years ago, which led to Reactor No. 4 exploding, catching fire and then spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere.

The Soviet authorities attempted to keep the disaster quiet. The wider world only learned something had happened at Chernobyl after radiation levels were detected as far north as Sweden. In Kyiv, residents were initially not told about the meltdown, which occurred just 65 kilometres to the south.

Efrem Lukatsky/Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

The reactor was initially housed inside a huge sarcophagus, which as recently as 2019 was still leaking radiation. That year, it was finally encased in an arch-shaped shelter. Inside, robots continued the painstaking process of dismantling what remained of the reactor.

Only now are officials Ukrainian officials comfortable in suggesting that, eventually, the exclusion zone, Prypat and even the entombed reactor could become a tourist destination: a monument not only to mankind's past mistakes, but to its ability to pick itself up and carry on.

“Our tourism is unique; it is not a classic concept of tourism,” said Bohdan Borukhovskyi, Ukraine's deputy environment minister.

"This is an area of ​​meditation and reflection, an area where you can see the impact of human error, but [where] you can also see the human heroism that corrects it.”

The airing of the HBO series saw tourist numbers double in 2019, authorities say, before the COVID-19 pandemic had brought it to a complete halt by the middle of 2020. When the pandemic recedes, officials hope that they can harness Chernobyl’s tourist potential.

Hence the work in Pripyat, where as well as vegetation-clearing and electrification, the authorities plan to construct set paths through the ruins so tourists can take in sights such as the city’s abandoned swimming pool and amusement park.

  • Off the beaten track: A guide to all of the countries in Europe you might have missed
  • Live volcanoes and frozen lakes: These are Europe's most dangerous hotels for daredevils
  • Chernobyl: Why the nuclear disaster was an accidental environmental success

Thriving wildlife

All four of the plant's reactors are in the process of being dismantled, but this work in itself will not be completed until 2064 at the earliest. Parts of the site could be radioactive for centuries but levels are now low enough for tourists to safely visit and for scientists to carry out their work.

Ukraine still forbids long-term habitation inside the zone, although about 100 people - mainly elderly former residents - are thought to have defied the order and continue to live there.

The absence of humans has led to the flourishing of wildlife, with bears, bison, wolves, lynx, wild horses, and dozens of bird species living around the site. It has also attracted scientists, who welcome the opportunity to study how animals respond to the relative absence of human development.

“This is a gigantic territory... in which we keep a chronicle of nature,” said biologist Denis Vishnevskiy, 43, who has been observing nature in the reserve for the past 20 years. “The exclusion zone is not a curse, but our resource ”

Now Ukraine is looking to have the exclusion zone listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“Chernobyl should not become a wild playground for adventure hunters,” Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko told AP.

“People should leave the exclusion zone with the awareness of the historical memory of this place and its importance for all mankind.”

You might also like

Anastasia, 24, signed up six years ago and is still waiting to be posted to the front.

For Ukraine's female soldiers, armed conflict is not the only danger

Women wearing black clothing and face masks with radioactivity sign march under umbrellas in Minsk. April 26, 2021

The most striking images from this week's top stories

A radiation sign outside the deserted town of Pripyat, some 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020

Chernobyl anniversary: what's the future of nuclear energy in the EU?

Facebook

Premium Content

abandoned toys in a room in Pripyat, Ukraine

The Nuclear Tourist

An unforeseen legacy of the Chernobyl meltdown

They say that five sieverts of radiation is enough to kill you, so I was curious to see the reading on my Russian-made dosimeter as our tour van passed into the exclusion zone— the vast, quarantined wilderness that surrounds Chernobyl. Thick stands of pines and birches crowded the roadside as our guide reminded us of the ground rules: Don’t pick the mushrooms, which concentrate radionuclides, or risk letting the contaminants into your body by eating or smoking outdoors. A few minutes later we passed the first of the abandoned villages and pulled over to admire a small band of wild Przewalski’s horses.

Twenty-eight years after the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the zone, all but devoid of people, has been seized and occupied by wildlife. There are bison, boars, moose, wolves, beavers, falcons. In the ghost city of Pripyat, eagles roost atop deserted Soviet-era apartment blocks. The horses—a rare, endangered breed—were let loose here a decade after the accident, when the radiation was considered tolerable, giving them more than a thousand square miles to roam.

I glanced at my meter: 0.19 microsieverts per hour—a fraction of a millionth of a single sievert, a measure of radiation exposure. Nothing to worry about yet. The highest levels I had seen so far on my trip to Ukraine were on the transatlantic flight from Chicago—spikes of 3.5 microsieverts per hour as we flew 40,000 feet over Greenland, cosmic rays penetrating the plane and passengers. Scientists studying Chernobyl remain divided over the long-term effects of the radiation on the flora and fauna. So far they have been surprisingly subtle. More threatening to the animals are the poachers, who sneak into the zone with guns.

A few minutes later we reached Zalesye, an old farming village, and wandered among empty houses. Broken windows, peeling paint, crumbling plaster. On the floor of one home a discarded picture of Lenin—pointy beard, jutting chin—stared sternly at nothing, and hanging by a cord on a bedroom wall was a child’s doll. It had been suspended by the neck as if with an executioner’s noose. Outside, another doll sat next to the remains of a broken stroller. These were the first of the macabre tributes we saw during our two days in the zone. Dolls sprawling half dressed in cribs, gas masks hanging from trees—tableaux placed by visitors, here legally or otherwise, signifying a lost, quiet horror.

Farther down the road we were surprised by an inhabitant. Dressed in a scarf, a red sweater, and a winter vest, Rosalia is one of what officials call the “returnees”—stubborn old people, women mostly, who insist on living out their lives in the place they call home. She seemed happy for the company. Prompted by our guide, she told us of worse hardships. The lands around Chernobyl (or Chornobyl, as it is known in Ukraine) are part of the Pripyat Marshes on the eastern front, where the bloodiest battles of World War II were fought. She remembers the German soldiers and the hardships under Stalin.

“You can’t see radiation,” she said in Ukrainian. Anyway, she added, she is not planning to have children. She lives with five cats. Before we departed, she showed us her vegetable garden and said her biggest problem now is Colorado potato bugs.

There is something deeply rooted in the human soul that draws us to sites of unimaginable disaster. Pompeii, Antietam, Auschwitz, and Treblinka—all eerily quiet now. But in the 21st century we hold a special awe for the aftermath of nuclear destruction. The splitting of the atom almost a hundred years ago promised to be the most important human advance since the discovery of fire. Unleashing the forces bound inside atomic nuclei would bring the world nearly limitless energy. Inevitably it was first used in warfare, but after Hiroshima and Nagasaki a grand effort began to provide electricity “too cheap to meter,” freeing the world from its dependence on fossil fuels.

More than half a century later the swirling symbol of the atom, once the emblem of progress and the triumph of technology, has become a bewitching death’s-head, associated in people’s minds with destruction and Cold War fear. Every spring visitors head for Stallion Gate in southern New Mexico for an open house at Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated—a preview of what was to come when the bombers reached Japan. Monthly tours to the Nevada Test Site in the Mojave Desert, where more than a thousand nuclear weapons were exploded during the Cold War, are booked solid through 2014.

Then there is the specter of nuclear meltdown. In 2011, Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst catastrophe at a nuclear power plant, was officially declared a tourist attraction.

Nuclear tourism. Coming around the time of the Fukushima disaster, the idea seems absurd. And that is what drew me, along with the wonder of seeing towns and a whole city—almost 50,000 people lived in Pripyat—that had been abandoned in a rush, left to the devices of nature.

Sixty miles away in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital city, weeks of bloody demonstrations had led in February to the expulsion of the president and the installation of a new government. In response to the upheaval Russia had occupied Crimea, the peninsula that juts from southern Ukraine into the Black Sea. Russian troops were massing on Ukraine’s eastern border. In a crazy way, Chernobyl felt like the safest place to be.

The other diehards in the van had come for their own reasons. John, a young man from London, was into “extreme tourism.” For his next adventure he had booked a tour of North Korea and was looking into options for bungee jumping from a helicopter. Gavin from Australia and Georg from Vienna were working together on a performance piece about the phenomenon of quarantine. We are used to thinking of sick people quarantined from the general population. Here it was the land itself that was contagious.

Of all my fellow travelers, the most striking was Anna, a quiet young woman from Moscow. She was dressed all in black with fur-lined boots, her long dark hair streaked with a flash of magenta. It reminded me of radioactivity. This was her third time at Chernobyl, and she had just signed up for another five-day tour later in the year.

“I’m drawn to abandoned places that have fallen apart and decayed,” she said. Mostly she loved the silence and the wildlife—this accidental wilderness. On her T-shirt was a picture of a wolf.

“ ‘Radioactive Wolves’?” I asked. It was the name of a documentary I’d seen on PBS’s Nature about Chernobyl. “It’s my favorite film,” she said.

You May Also Like

chernobyl tourism statistics

Radioactive dogs? What we can learn from Chernobyl's strays

chernobyl tourism statistics

This pill could protect us from radiation after a nuclear meltdown

chernobyl tourism statistics

Japan releases nuclear wastewater into the Pacific. How worried should we be?

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, during a scheduled shutdown for routine maintenance, the night shift at Chernobyl’s reactor number four was left to carry out an important test of the safety systems—one delayed from the day before, when a full, more experienced staff had been on hand.

Within 40 seconds a power surge severely overheated the reactor, rupturing some of the fuel assemblies and quickly setting off two explosions. The asphalt roof of the plant began burning, and, much more threatening, so did the graphite blocks that made up the reactor’s core. A plume of smoke and radioactive debris rose high into the atmosphere and began bearing north toward Belarus and Scandinavia. Within days the fallout had spread across most of Europe.

Throughout the night firefighters and rescue crews confronted the immediate dangers—flames, smoke, burning chunks of graphite. What they couldn’t see or feel—until hours or days later when the sickness set in—were the invisible poisons. Isotopes of cesium, iodine, strontium, plutonium. The exposures they received totaled as much as 16 sieverts—not micro or milli but whole sieverts, vastly more radiation than a body can bear. From the high-rises of Pripyat, less than two miles away, Chernobyl workers and their families stood on balconies and watched the glow.

In the morning—it was the weekend before May Day—they went about their routines of shopping, Saturday morning classes, picnics in the park. It was not until 36 hours after the accident that the evacuation began. The residents were told to bring enough supplies for three to five days and to leave their pets behind. The implication was that after a quick cleanup they would return home. That didn’t happen. Crews of liquidators quickly moved in and began bulldozing buildings and burying topsoil. Packs of dogs were shot on sight. Nearly 200 villages were evacuated.

The immediate death toll was surprisingly small. Three workers died during the explosion, and 28 within a year from radiation poisoning. But most of the effects were slow in unfolding. So far, some 6,000 people who were exposed as children to irradiated milk and other food have had thyroid cancer. Based on data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the overall mortality rate from cancer may rise by a few percent among the 600,000 workers and residents who received the highest doses, possibly resulting in thousands of premature deaths.

After the accident a concrete and steel structure—the sarcophagus—was hastily erected to contain the damaged reactor. As the sarcophagus crumbled and leaked, work began on what has been optimistically named the New Safe Confinement, a 32,000-ton arch, built on tracks so it can be slid into place when fully assembled. Latest estimate: 2017. Meanwhile the cleanup continues. According to plans by the Ukrainian government, the reactors will be dismantled and the site cleared by 2065. Everything about this place seems like science fiction. Will there even be a Ukraine?

What I remember most about the hours we spent in Pripyat is the sound and feel of walking on broken glass. Through the dilapidated hospital wards with the empty beds and cribs and the junk-strewn operating rooms. Through the school hallways, treading across mounds of broken-back books. Mounted over the door of an old science class was an educational poster illustrating the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Heat to visible light to x-rays and gamma rays—the kind that break molecular bonds and mutate DNA. How abstract that must have seemed to the schoolkids before the evacuation began.

In another room gas masks hung from the ceiling and were piled in heaps on the floor. They were probably left there, our guides told us, by “stalkers”—surreptitious visitors who sneak into the zone. At first they came to scavenge, later for the thrill. They drink from the Pripyat River and swim in Pripyat bay, daring the radiation and the guards to get them. A stalker I met later in Kiev said he’d been to Chernobyl a hundred times. “I imagined the zone to be a vast, burnt-out place—empty, horrible,” he told me. Instead he found forests and rivers, all this contaminated beauty.

Our tour group walked along the edge of a bone-dry public swimming pool, its high dive and racing clock still intact, and across the rotting floor of a gymnasium. Building after building, all decomposing. We visited the ruins of the Palace of Culture, imagining it alive with music and laughter, and the small amusement park with its big yellow Ferris wheel. Walking up 16 flights of steps—more glass crunching underfoot—we reached the top of one of the highest apartment buildings. The metal handrails had been stripped away for salvage. Jimmied doors opened onto gaping elevator shafts. I kept thinking how unlikely a tour like this would be in the United States. It was refreshing really. We were not even wearing hard hats.

From the rooftop we looked out at what had once been grand, landscaped avenues and parks—all overgrown now. Pripyat, once hailed as a model Soviet city, a worker’s paradise, is slowly being reabsorbed by the earth.

We spent the night in the town of Chernobyl. Eight centuries older than Pripyat, it now has the look of a Cold War military base, the center for the endless containment operation. My hotel room with its stark accommodations was like a set piece in a museum of life in Soviet times. One of the guides later told me that the vintage furnishings were salvaged from Pripyat. I wasn’t able to confirm that officially. The radiation levels in my room were no greater than what I’ve measured back home.

In a postapocalyptic video game called “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl,” virtual visitors to the radioactive wonderland can identify the hot spots by their blue-white glow. As you travel around the exclusion zone, the radiation counter for your avatar steadily increases. You can reduce your accumulation and avoid getting radiation sickness by drinking virtual Russian vodka.

If only it were so easy. By the next morning we were becoming almost cavalier about the exposure risk. Standing beneath the remains of a cooling tower, our guide, hurrying us along, exclaimed, “Oh, over here is a high-radiation spot! Let’s go see!” as casually as if she were pointing us toward a new exhibit in a wax museum. She pulled up a board covering the hot spot, and we stooped down holding our meters—they were frantically beeping—in a friendly competition to see who could detect the highest amount. My device read 112 microsieverts per hour—30 times as high as I had measured on the flight. We stayed for only a minute.

The hottest spot we measured that day was on the blade of a rusting earthmover that had been used to plow under the radioactive topsoil: 186 microsieverts per hour—too high to linger but nothing compared with what those poor firemen and liquidators got.

On the drive back to Kiev our guide tallied up our accumulated count—ten microsieverts during the entire weekend visit.

I’d probably receive more than that on the flight back home.

Related Topics

  • NUCLEAR ENERGY

chernobyl tourism statistics

What to do if you’re caught in a disaster while travelling

chernobyl tourism statistics

U.S. nuclear testing's devastating legacy lingers, 30 years after moratorium

chernobyl tourism statistics

Nuclear fusion powers stars. Could it one day electrify Earth?

chernobyl tourism statistics

Japan's Nuclear Refugees

chernobyl tourism statistics

This ship was supposed to usher in an age of nuclear-powered travel

  • Environment

History & Culture

  • History & Culture
  • Race in America
  • Mind, Body, Wonder
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Your US State Privacy Rights
  • Children's Online Privacy Policy
  • Interest-Based Ads
  • About Nielsen Measurement
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Nat Geo Home
  • Attend a Live Event
  • Book a Trip
  • Inspire Your Kids
  • Shop Nat Geo
  • Visit the D.C. Museum
  • Learn About Our Impact
  • Support Our Mission
  • Advertise With Us
  • Customer Service
  • Renew Subscription
  • Manage Your Subscription
  • Work at Nat Geo
  • Sign Up for Our Newsletters
  • Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

In Pictures

From nuclear disaster to Chernobyl’s booming tourism

Some 50,000 people visited the chernobyl exclusion zone, one of the most radioactive places on earth, in 2017..

A Soviet-era sign welcomes visitors to the city of Chernobyl.

Three decades since a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded in one of history’s worst nuclear disasters , tourists are flocking to the site in Ukraine , drawn by the chance to see the epicentre of a catastrophe that gripped the world’s attention.

On April 26, 1986 reactor No 4 exploded while scientists were conducting a safety test. The explosion and subsequent fire sent clouds of radioactive smoke across the USSR and into Europe.

Known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the towns and villages within a 30-kilometre radius around the destroyed reactor were evacuated of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants following the disaster.

In 2011, the Ukrainian government opened the Exclusion Zone to tourists over the age of 18. It remains one of the most radioactive places on Earth, though authorities insist it is now safe to visit.

Reclaimed by nature

About 50,000 people visited the Exclusion Zone last year, more than triple the number who came in 2015. An estimated 60 percent of the visitors are foreigners. In the Exclusion Zone, they find abandoned Soviet cities frozen in time and once-bustling urban centres reclaimed by nature.

The Exclusion Zone is governed by a separate legal entity from the rest of Ukraine and passports are thoroughly checked as visitors pass through two checkpoints into the area. On the way out, everyone must clear two rounds of radiation control, in which scanners check for radioactive dust.

Most visitors employ the services of a handful of tour companies who run buses to Chernobyl two hours north of Kiev. For a small fee, they also provide tourists with their own Geiger counters to measure radiation levels.

Sergei Mirnyi is the founder of the largest Chernobyl tour company. In 1986 he was working as a chemist in Kharkiv, Ukraine when the Chernobyl disaster unfolded. He was drafted into service as a commander of a radiation reconnaissance military unit and spent weeks in Chernobyl measuring levels of radioactivity in some of the most contaminated areas.

Enlightenment tool

Myrnyi said it’s his responsibility to spread awareness of what took place at Chernobyl, and visitors take away more from the experience than the momentary thrill of so-called “dark tourism”.

“I happened to be in this important place at the right time in the right position with the right qualifications to be a well-informed witness,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Tourism is a very powerful enlightenment tool. Many people leave Chernobyl with a different perspective than they arrived with.”

Mirnyi said the majority of the visitors are between 25-40 years of age and that the tourism has led to greater open-mindedness.

“The generations that lived through Chernobyl were terrified by the disaster. For the new generations, Chernobyl is an important event that they can view logically in a historical context.”

Nuclear reactors and the cooling pond at the Chernobyl power plant, site of the explosion and fire on April 26, 1986. The destroyed reactor No. 4 is covered in steel (pictured left). Other reactors at

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Why chernobyl has suddenly become a hotspot for global tourists.

Simon Ostrovsky

Simon Ostrovsky Simon Ostrovsky

  • Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-chernobyl-has-suddenly-become-a-hotspot-for-global-tourists

The site of the world’s worst radiological catastrophe is unexpectedly coming back to life -- due to an American television show. Scores of tourists are visiting Chernobyl, located in northern Ukraine, in response to an HBO miniseries that illuminates the disaster, which occurred before Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, in new detail. Special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky reports.

Read the Full Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Judy Woodruff:

As we have heard tonight, so much of the news these days centers on Ukraine.

Now we turn to one of the darkest chapters in that country's history, the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. That came before its independence from the Soviet Union.

Special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky in Northern Ukraine tells us how that darkness is now pierced by an unlikely wave of popularity.

Simon Ostrovsky:

Something strange is happening in Chernobyl. The site of the world's worst radiological catastrophe is coming back to life. It's not the residents who are returning, or nature taking over, as you may have heard. It's tourists, and they're coming in droves, thanks in part to an American TV show.

Stellan Skarsgard:

Get us over that building, or I will have you shot!

Jared Harris:

If you fly directly over that core, I promise you, by tomorrow morning, you will be begging for that bullet.

Tyler Ackley is an American visiting Chernobyl with his father-in-law, in part thanks to the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries dramatizing the disaster that came out earlier this year.

Tyler Ackley:

I thought, as my wife and I were watching the series, oh, great, now it's going to be a popular tourist destination before we get a chance to go there. Hopefully, it's not too crowded or anything like that.

The series brought not just the chronology of the disaster into tragic relief. It also exposed the top-heavy Soviet bureaucracy that tried to hide the scope of the accident from its own people and from the world.

… is that Legasov humiliate a nation that is obsessed with not being humiliated. We can make a deal with the KGB. You will leave this information out in Vienna. They quietly let us fix the remaining reactors.

Emily Watson:

Deal with the KGB? And I'm naive.

But graphic scenes from the miniseries, which we won't show here, have inexplicably failed to deter visitors from the Exclusion Zone, as the area around Chernobyl, where habitation is forbidden, is known.

Rudolph Fockema:

We did some research to see if it's — how dangerous it is from the radiation. And we saw that with the tours, it'll be safe.

Nichole Jensen:

Even though I started to get, like, a little panicked as it was coming up, researching if it actually is safe or not. So, yes, still a little scared.

Sergii Mirnyi, founder of one of several travel agencies bringing people to Chernobyl, told us there's been a dramatic increase in interest.

Sergii Mirnyi:

This miniseries has increased the interest to the Chernobyl zone. We predict that it will be like 30 percent increase. And so is the effect of the HBO miniseries. We expect 150,000, visitors in the zone in this year.

One hundred and fifty thousand people, maybe not much for the Mona Lisa, but the Louvre doesn't exactly have plutonium-241 on display either.

So these are our personal dosimeters. They're supposed to tell the researchers here how much every tourist absorbs in terms of radiation during their trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

We're right at the checkpoint right now, and, from here, it's to the reactor. Guides do what they can to reassure nervous visitors about the dose of radiation they will get on a typical day trip to the Exclusion Zone.

Do you know to which materials our bodies produce radiation? This is potassium 14, contained in our favorite fruits, bananas and nuts as well.

If, one day, you have a chance, and you surround yourself with 40 bananas, and spend about an hour accompanied by 40 bananas, you will get the same level of radiation that you will accumulate today, during one day presence in the Exclusion Zone.

But the reassurances also come with a warning not to stray from approved routes in case you blunder into a radioactive hot spot.

If you decide one minute to roll on the grass, on the ground, or hug trees, I don't know, or bushes, or wild animals, well, maybe there is a chance of contamination. But if you do not do these stupid things, everything will be all right.

Underneath this brand-new shelter behind me is Chernobyl reactor number four, which in 1986 exploded and sent lethal doses of radioactive material throughout the Exclusion Zone.

But, as you can see, it's actually not that exclusive. The draw is obvious. Chernobyl is billed as an open air museum of the Soviet era, uninhabited for 33 years, since Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge, frozen in time, taken over by nature.

Chernobyl, for me, is kind of — it's kind of a mecca of sorts. I'm — back home, I'm a professor of Russian literature, history, culture. I grew up in the height of the Cold War. I remember climbing under desks when they did mock bomb — nuclear bomb threats.

And so, for me, when I see all this debris and destruction here, for me, it's kind of symbolic, too, of the Soviet era.

Do you feel like Chernobyl might have been the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union?

Absolutely. I think it fell under heavy criticism from the world for that. And the moment Gorbachev tried to correct Soviet policies, the moment he tried to open things up, I don't think he knew what he was opening up. And I think the aftermath of that burned pretty hot.

As of September, more than 90,000 people have visited. It's already well above more than the number of people who decided to brave Chernobyl in the whole of 2018, according to the Exclusion Zone Administration.

So, this is actually my third trip to Chernobyl, but my first trip since I watched the HBO show. And I have got to say, it's a different experience, because Chernobyl is a disaster that I have lived with my entire life, but I didn't have an emotional connection to.

And now that I'm here, I'm imagining the drama that played out here from the scenes in the show.

Chernobyl lies now in an independent Ukraine. Then, it was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. And for Ukrainians, who are all too familiar with the consequences of the disaster, the show has served as a fresh reminder of what life was like under Moscow rule.

The HBO miniseries has reminded the many Ukrainians about necessity to have controls of their lives, of their country closer to their own hands, because it's a terrible feeling when you are only to rely on somebody else's decision who is very, very remote and may or may not care about you at all.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Simon Ostrovsky in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Listen to this Segment

chernobyl tourism statistics

Watch the Full Episode

Support Provided By: Learn more

More Ways to Watch

  • PBS iPhone App
  • PBS iPad App

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

American Cruise Line

  • Pre-Markets
  • U.S. Markets
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Futures & Commodities
  • Funds & ETFs
  • Health & Science
  • Real Estate
  • Transportation
  • Industrials

Small Business

Personal Finance

  • Financial Advisors
  • Options Action
  • Buffett Archive
  • Trader Talk
  • Cybersecurity
  • Social Media
  • CNBC Disruptor 50
  • White House
  • Equity and Opportunity
  • Business Day Shows
  • Entertainment Shows
  • Full Episodes
  • Latest Video
  • CEO Interviews
  • CNBC Documentaries
  • CNBC Podcasts
  • Digital Originals
  • Live TV Schedule
  • Trust Portfolio
  • Trade Alerts
  • Meeting Videos
  • Homestretch
  • Jim's Columns
  • Stock Screener
  • Market Forecast
  • Options Investing
  • Chart Investing

Credit Cards

Credit Monitoring

Help for Low Credit Scores

All Credit Cards

Find the Credit Card for You

Best Credit Cards

Best Rewards Credit Cards

Best Travel Credit Cards

Best 0% APR Credit Cards

Best Balance Transfer Credit Cards

Best Cash Back Credit Cards

Best Credit Card Welcome Bonuses

Best Credit Cards to Build Credit

Find the Best Personal Loan for You

Best Personal Loans

Best Debt Consolidation Loans

Best Loans to Refinance Credit Card Debt

Best Loans with Fast Funding

Best Small Personal Loans

Best Large Personal Loans

Best Personal Loans to Apply Online

Best Student Loan Refinance

All Banking

Find the Savings Account for You

Best High Yield Savings Accounts

Best Big Bank Savings Accounts

Best Big Bank Checking Accounts

Best No Fee Checking Accounts

No Overdraft Fee Checking Accounts

Best Checking Account Bonuses

Best Money Market Accounts

Best Credit Unions

All Mortgages

Best Mortgages

Best Mortgages for Small Down Payment

Best Mortgages for No Down Payment

Best Mortgages with No Origination Fee

Best Mortgages for Average Credit Score

Adjustable Rate Mortgages

Affording a Mortgage

All Insurance

Best Life Insurance

Best Homeowners Insurance

Best Renters Insurance

Best Car Insurance

Travel Insurance

All Credit Monitoring

Best Credit Monitoring Services

Best Identity Theft Protection

How to Boost Your Credit Score

Credit Repair Services

All Personal Finance

Best Budgeting Apps

Best Expense Tracker Apps

Best Money Transfer Apps

Best Resale Apps and Sites

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) Apps

Best Debt Relief

All Small Business

Best Small Business Savings Accounts

Best Small Business Checking Accounts

Best Credit Cards for Small Business

Best Small Business Loans

Best Tax Software for Small Business

Filing For Free

Best Tax Software

Best Tax Software for Small Businesses

Tax Refunds

Tax Brackets

Tax By State

Tax Payment Plans

All Help for Low Credit Scores

Best Credit Cards for Bad Credit

Best Personal Loans for Bad Credit

Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit

Personal Loans if You Don't Have Credit

Best Credit Cards for Building Credit

Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower

Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower

Best Mortgages for Bad Credit

Best Hardship Loans

All Investing

Best IRA Accounts

Best Roth IRA Accounts

Best Investing Apps

Best Free Stock Trading Platforms

Best Robo-Advisors

Index Funds

Mutual Funds

Pop culture is changing the tourism industry – the proof is in Chernobyl

thumbnail

  • HBO's miniseries "Chernobyl" aired May 6 and is now at the top of IMDb's list of top rated television shows. The city the show is based on is seeing a spike in visitors.
  • Kiev's tourism and promotion board expects to see 100,000 visitors to Chernobyl by the end of 2019, compared to the 70,000 in 2018.
  • The travel application Hopper found that flight search demand to Kiev – the city many Chernobyl visitors fly into – grew by 8% from the first week of May to the last.

As HBO's miniseries "Chernobyl" soared to the top of IMDb's list of top rated television shows , tourists flew to the actual Chernobyl.

More than 30 years after a nuclear accident left the Ukrainian city abandoned, Chernobyl is busy again. Kiev's tourism and promotion board expects to see 100,000 visitors to Chernobyl by the end of 2019, compared to the 70,000 in 2018.

Sergii Ivanchuk, the owner of SoloEast, a travel company that guides tours to Chernobyl, said he has had about 40% more bookings and inquires for July and August this year than he did last year. He also saw 500 more clients in May of this year compared to last.

Chernobylwel.com, another company leading trips to the site, has seen an increase in the hundreds since the series aired, according to its marketing manager Michal Krajcir.

"HBO made a real piece of great marketing for Chernobyl exclusion zone," Krajcir said. "That's why people are starting to read about Chernobyl, starting to ask questions and then, when they are well-educated about it, they are starting to plan their trip."

Flights to the area have also seen an uptick. Travel site Kayak found that flight search demand to Kiev — the city many Chernobyl visitors fly into — increased 18% since the show aired. Travel application Hopper found an 8% increase.

"Anecdotally, we've seen people mentioning they're more interested in visiting than they have ever been before," said Liana Corwin, consumer travel expert at Hopper.

Although it's hard to pinpoint an exact cause for travel in data, she said, pop culture has an impact.

"Pop culture really drives a lot of conversation and inspiration around tourism," Corwin said. "It can then lead to a trip that may not have happened before."

It's not the first time Hopper has seen this connection.

In April 2017, following the release of the chart-topping remix of song "Despacito" by Puerto Rican singers Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee featuring Justin Bieber, Hopper found that searches for flights to Puerto Rico increased by 58%. Corwin said the company also heard anecdotally that more people were planning to travel to the United Kingdom following the royal wedding of Price Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018.

It's important for travelers to remember that Chernobyl is the site of a devastating tragedy. Radiation of the nuclear accident killed 28 workers in the first four months after the event and gave 106 workers acute radiation sickness, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission . The commission also said two workers died from non-radiological causes and 200,000 received doses of between 1 and 100 rem, well above the U.S. citizen's average of about 0.6 rem.

The show's creator Craig Mazin asked visitors to keep this in mind in a tweet, saying visitors should, "Comport yourselves with respect for all who suffered and sacrificed."

@clmazin: It's wonderful that # ChernobylHBO has inspired a wave of tourism to the Zone of Exclusion. But yes, I've seen the photos going around. If you visit, please remember that a terrible tragedy occurred there. Comport yourselves with respect for all who suffered and sacrificed.

The photos Craig mentioned may refer to a tweet that was widely shared this week of people posing in various sites in Chernobyl. The Twitter user, Bruno Zupan, captioned captioned his post: "Meanwhile in Chernobyl: Instagram influencers flocking to the site of the disaster."

The Atlantic's Taylor Lorenz published an article Wednesday saying that only one of the photos was from an influencer, and that by cutting out the Instagram users' captions, Zupan's "tweet's claim is false, and its premise — that photos at sites of tragedy are inherently self-serving and in poor taste — is misleading."

While there's debate over whether it's appropriate to take images at the site, Ivanchuk of SoloEast is very against commercialization there. He said the selling of souvenirs with a radiation theme, which he has seen sold at the doorway of the exclusion site, is "immoral and disrespectful to those who survived the accident and who come to the zone every day either for business or for personal reasons, such as to visit relative graves or a house they had to leave."

Krajcir of Chernobylwel.com said he hopes the area will not change with the increasing number of tourists.

"We always tell our tourists to observe and feel the atmosphere, but try not to damage the zone, so others can come and also have the chance to relive all the stories," Krajcir said.

Both Ivanchuk and Anton Taranenko, head of Kiev's tourism and promotion board, said there are no longer concerns of radiation in Chernobyl.

"No concerns in terms of radiation ­– just general precautions when walking through the rubble," Ivanchuk said.

comscore

For less than $100, you can tour the abandoned towns around Chernobyl. Just watch out for radioactive trees and dogs, crumbling buildings, and the occasional selfie stick.

  • On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl became the worst nuclear disaster in history when a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant , sending radioactive material into the air.
  • Since the accident, only a few locals and a growing wildlife population have lived in the restricted area surrounding the power plant know as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone .
  • But, in recent years, tourists have begun flocking to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Some have referred to it as " dark tourism ," a trend where tourists travel to sites marked by death and suffering.
  • Guided tour companies have been taking visitors into the area since around 2000, and about 150,000 tourists are expected to visit Chernobyl in 2019, thanks, in part, to the popular HBO mini-series of the same name .
  • While a nuclear waste expert told Business Insider that visitors can expect "very minimal" radiation exposure , they are still advised not to touch any dogs, artifacts, trees, or building walls during tours.
  • We spoke to three people who recently visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to see what it's really like to tour the area.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant resulted in a cloud of radioactive particles spreading across parts of Europe.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: Business Insider , Adventure , BBC

The disaster has gone down in history as the world's worst nuclear accident.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Thirty-one people died in the explosion, and the areas surrounding the plant were permanently contaminated. They're now considered to be some of the most polluted areas on the planet.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: Reuters

As a result of the Chernobyl disaster, an exclusion zone was established in 1986 within a 19-mile radius of the power plant, and access to the area was heavily restricted for almost 30 years.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: Business Insider

Only a few locals still live within that area ...

chernobyl tourism statistics

Read more: Photos show what daily life is really like inside Chernobyl's exclusion zone, one of the most polluted areas in the world

... and there's a brimming population of wildlife, thanks to the lack of humans.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Read more: There's a thriving population of radioactive animals that have taken over the abandoned Chernobyl exclusion zone, even though the area is toxic for humans

But in recent years, the site has also become a hotspot for tourists looking to get a firsthand glimpse of the exclusion zone and what remains of the abandoned towns there.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The first wave of tourism started around 2011, which is when the area was opened for the first time to tourists traveling with a licensed guide. The Ukrainian government, however, warned at the time that tourists' safety wasn't guaranteed.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: CNN , The Guardian

But in July 2019, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the site would become an official tourist attraction. He said the area would become more accessible and tourist-friendly.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: CNN

"Until now, Chernobyl was a negative part of Ukraine's brand," Zelensky said as he signed the decree in July 2019. "It's time to change it."

chernobyl tourism statistics

Visitor interest is something that several local tour groups around Chernobyl are taking advantage of.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The guided tour company SoloEast has been taking visitors into Chernobyl since 2000, according to CNN. And the website for Chernobyl Tour advertises an "eye-opening experience of post-apocalyptic world."

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: Chernobyl Tour and Chernobyl Welcome and CNN

When Taylor Zwick, a tourist from Prague, booked his May 2019 guided tour of the exclusion zone through Chernobyl Tour, he told Business Insider that he had to provide his passport number.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Ines Aguilera, a Spanish student living in Copenhagen, said tour guide officials from Chernobyl Tour were very strict about that before she visited the exclusion zone during a different tour in mid-May. "We had to show our passports many times," she told Business Insider.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Aguilera and a group of friends were studying abroad in Copenhagen when they decided to go. "It's like one of these weird things that you've always wanted to do as a kid," Aguilera said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said it cost about $80 USD for a full-day tour, and Aguilera said her tour cost her about $88 USD. When we checked the Chernobyl Tour website in August, we found one-day trips priced at $99 and up. SoloEast's one-day tours are priced at $91 and up on its website, as of August.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Source: Chernobyl Tour and SoloEast

Zwick said he paid for part of his tour through PayPal when booking, and he had to pay the rest in person with cash. Aguilera told Business Insider that she had to do the same thing when she booked. She paid the second half in cash when she entered the shuttle bus.

chernobyl tourism statistics

They were given instructions upon booking. Aguilera said they had to wear long sleeves, long pants, and couldn’t have space between their pant legs and socks. They wouldn't be able to touch any metal or the ground while touring Chernobyl either.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Julia Czub, a student from the UK who toured Chernobyl in May 2019 with SoloEast tour company, told Business Insider that they weren't allowed to touch trees inside the exclusion zone and couldn't leave a bag or anything on the ground.

chernobyl tourism statistics

She said she booked the tour in December 2018, nearly six months before the HBO show was released, so interest in visiting Chernobyl certainly predates the successful mini-series.

chernobyl tourism statistics

A mix of visitors from nearby European countries were in all three tourists' tour groups. Zwick said he encountered a group from Sweden that had gone to Kiev for a bachelor party and decided to take a private tour of Chernobyl.

chernobyl tourism statistics

After booking online, visitors received a QR code, which is how they gained entry into Chernobyl, according to Zwick. The code was scanned when boarding the bus in Kyiv that took them to Chernobyl.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he met the bus at Kiev's train station. It was a full-sized coach bus with about 40 to 45 people onboard. The bus left the train station at 8 a.m. ...

chernobyl tourism statistics

... and Zwick said it took about two hours to get to the Leliv checkpoint at the outer edge of the smaller, 10km (6 mile) exclusion zone surrounding the power plant.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Aguilera said that her drive wasn't the most enjoyable. "It was very uncomfortable because the roads were so bumpy," she said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Before entering the exclusion zone, Zwick said they were given what looked similar to flash drives attached to green lanyards that they were to put around their necks.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The devices were meant to measure the different radiation levels they were exposed to while on their tour. Zwick said that the tour guides collect them at the end of the tour and give them to officials.

chernobyl tourism statistics

After stopping at the Leliv checkpoint, Zwick said they turned onto a side road toward Moscow's Eye, or the Duga-1 radar station, that Soviets intended to use as a warning system against US missiles in the Cold War era.

chernobyl tourism statistics

By about 1 p.m., Zwick said they drove the rest of the way to the Chernobyl power plant.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Czub said you're not allowed to take photos too close to the reactor, but she was still able to get near it. "I had no idea that we would be able to get so close to it," Czub said. "We were literally right next to it."

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he ate lunch at the Chernobyl Canteen where the workers eat, which is right next to the power plant. There's a workforce that lives nearby and works on the plant three weeks at a time before taking a break to avoid extreme exposure to the radiation.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he saw dogs hanging out in front of the cafeteria. Czub said that she also saw many of the "Chernobyl dogs" around the zone during the tour.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Read more: Chernobyl workers are adopting the site's contaminated dogs, but not all of them are safe to pet 

Zwick said the food was included in the tour package he purchased. He was served mashed potatoes, chicken, and soup, and he said it was decent. Aguilera said she brought her own meal after reading so many bad TripAdvisor reviews of them.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said they stayed in the cafeteria for 30 minutes to an hour before heading to Pripyat, the abandoned ghost town that was once the shining star of the Soviet Union. The town housed plant workers back in the 1980s.

chernobyl tourism statistics

There were swimming pools, supermarkets, and other attractive amenities that have since spiraled into decay.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Czub said Pripyat was her favorite part of the tour. "I didn't expect the city to look so interesting," she said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

She said there was a cafe right next to the river with beautiful stained glass windows. They wandered around Pripyat for an hour to an hour and a half, Zwick said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

There were some areas that Zwick said their group's tour guide didn't take them. For example, they didn't see the swimming pool like Aguilera was able to.

chernobyl tourism statistics

"That was our highlight," Aguilera said of visiting the abandoned pool.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said the itinerary isn't super strict, it just depends on what everyone in the tour group wants to do.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Throughout the trip, Zwick said he carried a Geiger counter, a device that can measure radiation levels, that he rented from the tour company for $10.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Aguilera said she and her two friends also rented one to use throughout the trip.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said his readings fluctuated throughout his tour through the contaminated exclusion zone. In front of the reactor at the nuclear power plant, Zwick said his counter gave off normal readings

chernobyl tourism statistics

But at one point it reached 200 mSv near the Ferris wheel in Pripyat's amusement park. A normal radiation reading is 3 mSv.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said a tour guide told them that the reading near the Ferris wheel was because of a speck of radioactive dust that had traveled from the reactor to one of the Ferris wheel cars at the time of the explosion, and it's still there giving off a high radiation level.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Many of the buildings in the zone are made of concrete. Zwick said tour officials told him that most of the wooden buildings had to be demolished since wood traps radiation.

chernobyl tourism statistics

But Aguilera said even the remaining concrete structures are deteriorating.

chernobyl tourism statistics

"I don’t know how long these tours are going to be possible because the buildings are about to collapse," Aguilera said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Many of the signs on top of buildings are in the Ukrainian language, but the signs inside an abandoned store were in Russian, Zwick said. He said that he was told that at the time, Russians were trying to usher out the Ukranian language, so they tried to include a lot of Russian when they originally built the city of Pripyat.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Pripyat was the last stop on the tour, Zwick said. After that, they started to head back to Kiev. At the checkpoint, they had to get out and go through radiation scanners.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said it was similar to walking through a metal detector. He said the point of it was to make sure each visitor didn't absorb an abnormal amount of radiation. "It was just like going through a door," Aguilera said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

He also said there wasn't even someone standing next to the scanner. "It looks like a very secure place, but at the end of the day, they were just sitting there," Zwick said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he felt like the radiation scanners were more of a formality.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said that at the various checkpoints, there were souvenir shops where you could buy sweatshirts, hats, snacks, and Geiger counters.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Czub also said she saw the souvenir stall, though she said it felt weird to her to purchase something. But "there were a lot of people buying things," she said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Aguilera said she bought some postcards and a patch to put on her backpack.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he was inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone for a total of almost nine hours. Aguilera said the same.

chernobyl tourism statistics

All three visitors that we spoke to also said tour guide officials told them that the radiation they were exposed to was minimal.

chernobyl tourism statistics

"We had more radiation going from Copenhagen to Kiev than in the exclusion zone," Aguilera said. "At least that's what they told us."

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said he was also told that the radiation he was exposed to from spending the whole day there was the equivalent of a 3-hour flight and that a chest X-ray gives you 40 times more radiation than did the tour they were on.

chernobyl tourism statistics

As more and more tourists travel to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, some have viewed the visitors as insensitive to the gravity of the tragedy that left dozens dead and hundreds of thousands more without homes.

chernobyl tourism statistics

For years, some have referred to Chernobyl tourism as "dark tourism," a trend of visitors flocking to sites marked by death and suffering.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Photographer David McMillan has visited and photographed the Chernobyl exclusion zone at least 20 times over the course of 25 years. He told Business Insider that he's watched as tourism has grown increasingly common at the site.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Read more: A photographer visited the abandoned towns around Chernobyl more than 20 times over the past 25 years, and the captivating photos show just how suddenly time stopped in its tracks after the disaster

"They're there with their smartphones taking selfies," McMillan said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

But Czub said that, though she took photos throughout her tour, she tried to be mindful and respectful. A native of Poland, she said people from her country are specifically interested in Chernobyl because they're so close to the site of the disaster.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Zwick said his trip to Chernobyl taught him more about the history of the disaster and what happened in the aftermath.

chernobyl tourism statistics

And Aguilera said she tried to stay respectful throughout the tour and that she's always been moved by the story of the Chernobyl accident.

chernobyl tourism statistics

She also said she's seen the HBO mini-series since taking her trip through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and that the show's recreation of the scenes inside the zone are realistic.

chernobyl tourism statistics

"I see my photos and then I see the TV show — it looks quite similar," Aguilera said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Czub said the HBO show will likely keep drawing crowds, and so does the owner of the SoloEast tour group, who told CNN that he's seen an almost 40% increase in interest since the mini-series aired.

chernobyl tourism statistics

"I'm guessing there's going to be more and more coming now," Czub said.

chernobyl tourism statistics

  • Main content

Chernobyl dreams: investigating visitors’ storytelling in the Chernobyl exclusion zone

International Journal of Tourism Cities

ISSN : 2056-5607

Article publication date: 13 December 2022

Little is known about the overall meaning of the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) from the visitors’ point of view. Conceptualizing the zone as a storyscape and its narratives as intangible heritage resources, this study aims to investigate the visitors’ engagement with these resources and the resulting articulations from the engagements as translated into verbal and visual storytelling.

Design/methodology/approach

Participant observation and participant generated images in combination with in-depth interviews with different types of tourists were conducted. This paper uses the photographs chosen by the interviewees themselves as a photo essay to explore the evocation of stories through narrative engagement.

Through participant-oriented research, this study identified three dominant storytelling themes through which visitors focus their understanding of the CEZ. Visitors’ narrative engagements and visual storytelling co-produce the site and entail fluid and even conflicting narrative articulations about the CEZ and its cultural significance.

Research limitations/implications

The discoveries of this study stem from a unique developing heritage site. This study provided a more nuanced understanding of the different visitor categories in the CEZ and their group-specific ways to articulate, imagine and co-produce the storyscape of Chernobyl.

Originality/value

Gaining insight into the verbal and visual storytelling of tourists will contribute to the discussion of narrative consumption of different consumption profiles in tourism sites in addition to the mediation and construction of entangled memory spaces.

  • Dark tourism
  • Visual studies
  • Storytelling

Ojala, V. (2022), "Chernobyl dreams: investigating visitors’ storytelling in the Chernobyl exclusion zone", International Journal of Tourism Cities , Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-04-2022-0094

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Veera Ojala.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Introduction

This paper seeks to continue earlier research on storytelling in dark tourism ( Kužnik and Veble, 2018 ; Lennon, 2018 ; Tercia et al. , 2022 ) through visitors’ narrative engagement with a case study on the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ), which has been in the process of gradual marketisation as an international tourism destination ( Banaszkiewicz et al. , 2017 ). Therefore, a study conducted from the perspective of international visitors themselves is timely.

The nuclear power plant accident in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, is one of the largest catastrophes in recorded history and the worst ever disaster in the history of nuclear reactors ( Medvedev, 1990 ; Chernousenko, 1991 ). Thirty-one people died as an immediate result of the explosion, and the contamination forced the evacuation and resettlement of 350,000 people. Over 600,000 liquidators were involved in securing and cleaning operations in the area. Current estimates place the mortality toll somewhere between 4,000 deaths estimated by the United Nations and 90,000 suggested by Greenpeace. The full consequences of the disaster, including the long-term social consequences, are still being debated and studied. Many controversies, the accident's unprecedented nature and the unknown nature of its consequences all contribute to its symbolic power ( Dobraszczyk, 2010 ). Arguably, vagueness about the numbers of victims and the sheer difficulty of comprehending or measuring accurately the full-scale consequences of the disaster have contributed to the creation of a mythical Chernobyl imaginary. In addition, the contemporary storyscape of Chernobyl is a rich narrative template, which combines pieces from both fantasy and reality. As it is often the case with contested heritage, its intangibility serves both “to augment its human fascination and to compound the elasticity of its interpretation” ( Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996 , p. 129).

Due to the long-term and far-reaching social, cultural and economic effects of the disaster: health impairments, the trauma brought by the evacuation, the loss of jobs, social networks and places of historical value, it has not remained unnoticed in the social sciences or humanities either ( Stone, 2013 ; Yankovska & Hannam, 2013 ; Yankovska & Hannam, 2018 ). Phenomenological, autoethnographical inquiries into visitors’ embodied responses, interpretation processes and engagements with the sites of dark and difficult heritage have recently acquired more academic attention ( Farkić, 2020 ; Farkić & Kennell, 2021 ; Hryhorczuk, 2019 ; Rush-Cooper, 2020 ). These studies diversify the knowledge on embodiment and senses behind the tourists’ site experience and in the construction of the site knowledge. However, what has remained unnoticed are the varying forms of tourism and their particular engagements with the heritage resources in the CEZ. Hence, the elaboration of different types of visitors and their particular forms of storytelling makes this paper an addition to the current research body.

The emphasis of this article will be on the visitors’ engagements with the heritage resources in CEZ and how these encounters translate into patterns of storytelling. The data collected in 2019–2020 comprises semi-structured interviews in addition to participant-generated images (PGI), which are used to elaborate on the interactive narrative spaces opened up by the image and on-site visit. The current paper provides consideration of how such a contested site of dark heritage is viewed by the visitors themselves by analysing the practises of engagement with the site through the storytelling of different visitor profiles ( Lennon, 2018 ). Consciously aiming for an interdisciplinary approach and merging dark tourism studies with the branch of visual and nuclear heritage studies, this research uses the notions of dissonant heritage in addition to verbal and visual storytelling, particularly concentrating on the heritage resources as narratives which translate into visitors’ photographs.

The place of dark tourism in heritage studies

The phenomenon of visiting places of atrocity, accidents, natural disasters and battlefields became more visible in the late nineties, and as a result, during the years 1995–2000, three new concepts were introduced into tourism research: dissonant heritage, dark tourism and thanatourism ( Hartmann, 2014 ; Light, 2017 ). The concepts of dark tourism, thanatourism and dissonant heritage are used to describe, define and conceptualise various forms of tourism in the places associated with death, suffering and atrocity, with nuances in content. Dark tourism is commonly defined as “the presentation and consumption of real and commodified death” ( Foley & Lennon, 1996 ), whereas thanatourism is understood as “a trip to a location motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death” ( Seaton, 1996 ). Dissonance heritage, on the other hand, proposes that heritage resources have different meaning and significance for groups of stakeholders, thus making heritage, by its nature, dissonant ( Light, 2017 ; Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996 ).

Alongside the development of initial definitions and typologies, there has been a growing interest and effort to identify sub-forms of dark tourism and, therefore, a myriad of different conceptualizations have emerged over the past decades, such as dystopian dark tourism ( Farkić, 2020 ; Podoshen et al. , 2015 ), disaster tourism ( Robbie, 2008 ; Yankovska & Hannam, 2013 ) and nuclear tourism ( Gusterson, 2004 ; Hryhorczuk, 2019 ). A consensus has not been reached regarding the definition of the phenomenon nor its relation to heritage studies generally ( Lennon, 2017 ; Light, 2017 ). Lennon and Powell (2018) conceptualise the term as inclusive, which incorporates the extensive and identifiable phenomena of visitation to sites associated with the shared darker past of humanity. Light (2017 , p. 277) suggests that dark tourism and thanatourism seem to be little different from heritage tourism. Therefore, there is an increasing return to heritage ( Hryhorczuk, 2019 ; Light, 2017 ) to understand tourists’ activities at such places.

As Lennon (2018 , p. 142) indicates, “the tourist attractions at sites of dark and dissonant heritage become key physical elements of heritage, either authentic or created, that combine in whole or part, commemoration, history, and record”. The investigation of heritage from the point of view of tourism contains the notion that heritage is not a relic but has an important instrumental dimension. Tourism produces special heritage outcomes because tourists have an interest in special experiences, artefacts and narratives in the context of heritage ( Šešić & Mijatović, 2014 ). Importantly, it is not only the physical components and materiality of the site that are of interest in the heritage markets. Intangible heritage, such as narratives, ideas and feelings, is communicated through the interpretation of physical elements ( Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996 , p. 8). What is left under-investigated is the more specific ways in which visitors interact with the heritage resources in order to mutually shape and enact the on-site experiences. In this paper, I investigate these interactions by looking into visitors’ verbal and visual storytelling in CEZ, thus contributing to the understanding of how visitors construe and consume the site through narratives.

Storytelling in heritage sites

A heritage site can be viewed as a storyscape, a landscape where narratives are the central objects of consumption ( Chronis, 2005 ; Chronis et al. , 2012 ). Storytelling at a heritage site communicates the experiential value that can act as a catalyst for tourism experiences and frames the imagined value of the heritage destination ( Tercia, Teichert, Sirad, & Murniadi, 2022 ). Storytellers create the world rather than simply recording it ( Olson, 2016 ). In a story, there is a plot, a setting and a narrator with the aim of creating a final point to be made ( Sigala & Steriopoulos, 2021 ). Storytelling has a significant role in both supply and demand in tourism, as the known stories about the site can be commodified for the visitors, thus increasing the appeal of the site, and enhancing the tourists’ experience ( Kužnik & Veble, 2018 ; Lennon, 2018 ; Tercia et al. , 2022 ). However, visitors are not passive participators in the co-construction process of narrative interpretation; they have their own individual narrative dispositions about the meaning of the past, which are influenced by many factors: personal associations, prior knowledge, age and nationality ( Chronis, 2012 ). Due to the idiosyncratic refigurations of history in the touristscape, the resultant imaginaries can be multiple ( Chronis, 2012 , p. 1811). Visitors flesh out the story by using their existing knowledge, filling the narrative gaps and enacting the story through their patterns of exploring and imagining the site.

Storytelling in Chernobyl

The subject of this current article, the CEZ, was established on May 2, 1986, six days after reactor number four had exploded. It has been officially open to visitors since 2011 ( Hryhorczuk, 2019 ). The borders have been adjusted since the establishment a number of times. Today, the area designated as the “exclusion zone” is the size of a Luxembourg state. Along with the process of touristification and gradual marketisation ( Banaszkiewicz et al. , 2017 ; Stone, 2013 ), which can be reflected in the increase in the number of visitors alongside the construction of visitor infrastructure such as accommodation places, visitors’ centres and sanitation facilities, there are intentions on the part of tourism industry stakeholders to attach the CEZ to UNESCO’s world heritage list. Thus, the zone would join the category of UNESCO’s nuclear cultural heritage along with the Genbaku Monument in Hiroshima and the infamous nuclear testing site at the Bikini atoll. The CEZ would symbolise man’s greatest technological failure and would function as a reminder of the threat of increasing reliance on dangerous technology ( Hryhorczuk, 2019 ).

There is not a single narrative authority regarding Chernobyl. The competing narratives construct Chernobyl in different ways: “as a medical and financial crisis, a tale of government mismanagement, a warning to humanity, or an ecological success story” ( Hutching & Linden, 2018 , pp. 209–210). The storyscape of Chernobyl consists of a plethora of symbolic meanings. This multivocality has been enhanced by biblical passages and coincidental analogies to the accident in literature, such as the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1972) and the subsequent film Stalker (1979) by Tarkovsky, which have shaped the cultural constructions of Chernobyl in often mythological ways. The landscapes of the abandoned city of Pripyat were further used in computer games such as Call of Duty and S.T.A.L.K.E.R ., which speaks to the fact that fantasy and fiction constitute a multi-layered composition of different memories, representations and narratives of Chernobyl.

This study seeks now to investigate how the visitors of the exclusion zone are construing the tale of Chernobyl through these complex and dynamic collections of narratives and imaginaries through storytelling after visiting Chernobyl. The visitors of the CEZ may, through different tour choices, frame the storytelling in varying ways. I will be arguing that this framing, enabled by the tour choice, establishes distinct patterns of storytelling and, therefore, those reflect different narrative articulations of the storyscape of Chernobyl.

Methodology

This study was conducted with an ethnographic case study approach in combination with a multi-methods orientation comprising qualitative interviews and PGI, particularly concentrating on the demand side of tourism ( Çakar & Aykol, 2021 ). The examination of the setting started as fieldwork, which took place in Ukraine over a two-month period in September and October of 2019. This geographical proximity due to the fieldwork enabled my personal journeys into the CEZ, and this engagement with the tours and the overall fieldwork in Ukraine provided a useful overview of the types of tours currently available in the area. To meet the diverse set of visitors and their needs, there are a plethora of different tours available, ranging from a one-day tour to multiple-day private tours that can be fully customised to a client’s needs. For visitors who are after an intense experience, it is possible to book online the so-called unofficial or “Stalker tour” into the exclusion zone. The latter presents itself as an alternative to the standardised “mass-market tours” ( UrbexTour, 2022 ). My engagement with the tours and the overall fieldwork in Ukraine provided context knowledge which was further used when continuing the interviews with the actual interest group of this research, the visitors of the exclusion zone.

The interviewees were recruited from the Facebook platforms in September 2019 and January 2020. The establishment of these online communities is based on the idea of a collective commemoration of the Chernobyl disaster. In these groups, the members usually publish their photographs and share their experiences from their visits to the CEZ. For the purpose of this research, these platforms were valuable sources of visitor data in combination with their visual records of the CEZ. The group members were sent private messages where I introduced myself and the purpose of the study, after they had shared images on the forum. In most cases, the research participants had visited the exclusion zone a while before, ranging from a few months to a few weeks, thus enabling the participants to have some time to reflect upon their experiences. The social media platforms enabled communication with participants from 17 different countries of origin. Their ages vary between 21 and 59, and they come from different occupational classes in society. Men are more present, as the interview requests were more commonly accepted by men, although I pursued sending interview requests equally to men and women. Thirty-eight out of 40 were conducted with the assistance of Skype. Two other respondent interviews were conducted in September and October 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

A total of 40 ( n = 40) semi-structured in-depth interviews ranging in length from 30 to 90 min were conducted all in English. Personal interviews focused on the visitors’ experiential benefits, particular tour choices, their interactions during the visit and their practises of photographing. Along with the in-depth interviews, the research design comprised the PGI method ( Rose, 2016 ). Whereas the benefits of photo-elicitation have been widely acknowledged, it is less common for these photographs to be provided by the participants themselves ( Balomenou & Garrod, 2016 ). Respondents were asked to send the author of this study three to four photographs that they took while visiting the CEZ and which describe the place and their experiences in that place most accurately. It was a logical supplement for the interview questionnaire as well, as the interview covered questions concerning the respondent’s photographic practises in the CEZ. The participants’ photographs therefore assisted in elaborating the individual engagement with the site and the place-specific narratives that could not have been expressed only linguistically. More importantly, it made visible the emerging storytelling forms of different visitor categories; group, private and unofficial, which were then processed into the themes of this study when the data was analysed.

Narrative analysis was chosen because it is appropriate for exploring intrapersonal and interpersonal participant experiences and actions to understand a specific phenomenon through a story ( Saldaña, 2016 ). All interviews were audio-recorded with participants’ permission and transcribed verbatim in English. I organised and coded the data using Atlas.ti software. In narrative analysis, the focus is on “the stories that people employ to account for events” ( Bryman, 2016 , p. 590). The narrative analysis was used as a means of unpicking the details within a given account of a participant ( Grbich, 2013 , p. 216), and the deeper meaning of the details in used language and expressions were further processed into themes and sub-themes. First, I identified each individual storyteller’s position within the tour choice categories. Second, I linked each position to a distinct narrative in the transcript that it elicited. Third, I classified all the narratives to develop key themes; the particular tour of the participant, whether group, private or unofficial, comprises distinct patterns of storytelling and activities of photographing.

An iterative movement between the emergent understanding during the fieldwork and collected data resulted in an enriched understanding of visitors’ experiences and the emergent patterns of storytelling were further triangulated in subsequent participant interviews. The remainder of the article is structured as follows: The results part presents the identified three themes of storytelling, which became visible with the methodology and theoretical framework of this study: By combining image and textual accounts gained through interviews, they will be presented as the basis for the subsequently discussed modes of storytelling; the tale of mighty nature, the tale of apocalyptic afterness and the tale of the mythical zone ( Table 1 ).

The tale of mighty nature

As sites of dissonance heritage are essentially multi-layered ( Kužnik & Veble, 2018 ), the exclusion zone can be articulated through various storytelling forms. Visitors to the CEZ are one category of stakeholder among the tour providers and individuals who are impacted due to the accident that participate in the articulation and production of these narratives of place. The first storytelling format that this study identified was articulated by the respondents who visited the CEZ on a one-day group tour. The visitors follow the route itinerary that consists of the main sights in the CEZ, such as Duga-radar, Chernobyl town, the nuclear power plant and the abandoned city of Pripyat. The route is pre-determined, and the visitors are accompanied by the tour guide. A respondent (15) described her decision to visit the exclusion zone:

That given its chance, nature will find the way, and I wanted to go and visit the abandoned town. And see the fact that nature has started to recuperate things and live really, it is the sort of going around a ghost town, that’s the main reason.

As it comes clear, the abandoned town, which is slowly being covered over by nature was a sufficiently alluring travel destination for these respondents per se. The spontaneous decision to visit the exclusion zone and the activity of “going around the ghost town” describe incisively the group tour visitors’ specific style of travel to the exclusion zone and the relationship with its landscapes they sought to experience.

Pripyat is already an impressive experience in terms of its scale; 50,000 inhabitants lived in the city before the 1986 evacuation. Its ruins simulate an alternative experience of the modern city. The deserted city provides a contrast to organised life in contemporary societies by challenging controlled, staged and regulated urban space. The group tour reveals the size of the exclusion zone, the scale of the destruction and the many historical details of the area ( Plate 1 ).

The movements of the visitors that took the group tour were mostly concentrated on the exterior surfaces in the exclusion zone. As a result, they recognised nature and its spatial outcomes in the area. The decaying silhouettes of the city and villages were “impressive” to look at, but they contained dangers and risks, and looking at them from the position of distant contemplation was a sufficient level of engagement for these respondents:

It looks so beautiful, but at the same time it is so different because it has to fight for its survival in this new mode of existence, and at the same time it is horrifying and beautiful because it can do that, the new order of earth. (Respondent 38)

The visit provides an opportunity for extraordinary sensory experiences: what does the infrastructure of a medium-sized city look and feel like when slowly disappearing under vegetation? Another respondent (5) described his experience:

I would say the city of Pripyat was indescribable. It is impressive to see such a young city abandoned. The town was not founded until 1970, so it was only 16 years old before the accident. It was impressive to see such a big city completely abandoned and to see how life continues even after such a terrible disaster. ( Plate 2 )

As these respondents’ accounts and photographs illustrate, the visitors who joined the group tour construed their storytelling by engaging with the exterior surfaces in the area. The landscapes and slowly disappearing silhouettes of infrastructure impacted them deeply due to the loss they signified, but nature’s inexhaustible ability to recover was a way for interviewees to discuss their experiences of the tour. Even after the most devastating nuclear accident, life continues in nature. The story is forwarded verbally and visually and is thus referred to as the tale of mighty nature.

The tale of apocalyptic afterness

The second storytelling format could be identified from the accounts of the respondents that visited the exclusion zone on a private tour. A common denominator in the experience of visitors from this category was that they were less satisfied with common, regulated patterns of tourist activities in the area. A respondent (13) reasoned his choice with the following argument:

Like this really honest and personal and a good opportunity to see things that are not just touristic. I did not know exactly what you would do, but I knew it would be some kind of non-touristic, not-so-guided tour. That is what I expected and what happened.

The respondents sought to avoid the more pre-planned tours, as those would place too many limitations on their on-site experience. In contrast to the top-down style of tours through the CEZ, respondents who chose the private tour sought equally to avoid the crowds of other visitors and the more touristic spots in the zone.

As Dobraszczyk (2010) has acknowledged, the ruins of Pripyat offer many opportunities for sensory pleasure, but equally, due to the sheer scale of the ruined environment, it can overwhelm the visitors. Whereas the previous category presented visitors who engaged with the narrative resources mostly through encounters with the landscape and exterior surfaces, a pronounced engagement among the private tour visitors was the artefacts and the insides of the buildings. Due to this type of visitor’s choreography, respondents construed the story of the zone through its attributes of absence :

The place is abandoned for the most part, 50 000 people, so being there with a big group you miss the soul of this place. You miss being inside a building because the 10 of you can’t go inside the buildings and just sit there and listen to the wood creak from the window outside. You miss that if you are in a big, noisy, loud group. (Respondent 14)

Plate 3 , an informant photograph taken in a Pripyat barber shop, exemplifies the type of multi-sensual engagement sought from private tours. The room shows explicit signs of devastation and absence brought by the natural decay. The plaster and paint on the walls are chipped, and the floor is covered by garbage and empty bottles. These impressions are warmly illuminated by the sunlight coming out of the window. The picture represents the special relationship the respondent sought to perceive with their surroundings. It could be the sensitivity to the sounds of the zone, as the respondent described above, or the ability to sense the light or wind.

In addition to the atmospheric sensory engagement with the contradictions and ambiguities of the ruins, another way that the respondents reconstructed the narratives of the zone was through their observations of the artefacts that can be found inside of the buildings.

The narrative of the accident was reconstructed when the respondents could observe and photograph these reminiscences of the people who once inhabited the area. The tangibility of these artefacts was a crucial aspect in connecting the respondents to the CEZ and what led to their particular storytelling. These embodied experiences created moments of presence, which brought forth a powerful emotionality, as expressed by a respondent (27):

When you enter a place like Kopachi kindergarten, it’s like nails to the ground. There were little beds in perfect shape, and the dolls and puppets were still lying there. They did not take anything; it was all just left over there. There were children that used to play with those dolls; it really goes into your head. ( Plate 4 )

The moments the respondent described as those presence moments, or moments of being-there ( Chronis, 2012 ), were generative for a deeper understanding of the past, where narrative imagination is informed by the particularities of the environment. The ruins of Pripyat, and generally the ruins of the whole CEZ, are shaped by systematic looting rather than natural decay ( Dobraszczyk, 2010 , p. 381), and visitors themselves might rearrange the artefacts. It is still the emotive value of these artefacts that functioned as a channel to the residents that possessed them once and created the narrative engagement and the second type of storytelling: the tale of apocalyptic afterness .

The tale of the mythical zone

A further approach into the storyscape of CEZ that this study identified was forwarded by those who visited the zone on an unofficial tour, also called the Stalker or Chernobyl Urbex Tour. The visitors in this category enter the exclusion zone by trespassing. In practice, this means that they place themselves outside the official safety regulations of the CEZ; they access the area with an unofficial guide; they explore the area outside the marked routes for visitors; and they enter the ruins and buildings of various kinds in the zone. This provided an interpretation frame that rejected the established regulations and gradual standardisation of the tours in the exclusion zone.

Placing their visitor subjectivities and bodies in the closest proximity to the storyscape, they partook in a choreography where the respondent allowed the landscape to go through them, as in intense bodily experience:

And if you do it like unofficially, you push it kind of through yourself and it becomes part of you. Your own knowledge that you gathered, not from the others; you get your own. (Respondent 6)

What is informative in this excerpt is that it is not a mere extension of a visitor’s knowledge but an embodied, physical understanding and reading of the storyscape and its events that respondents sought. The visitors in this category exhibited patterns of exploration that were characterised by their physical proximity to the CEZ, their special movements through the area at night and the need to remain undetected. Due to this type of tour, respondents experienced the landscapes of the zone through the mythical attributes they attached to them:

Time moves in a different rhythm; you mostly travel at night, so that alone… It turns the way you used to live upside down. It is a lot to describe really. (Respondent 33)

The stories of these respondents emphasised the transformative attributes of the zone as a place that has the capability to turn the ordering of the world upside down. Equally, the trip through the surrounding forest was not merely perceived as any forest; it was the forest of the exclusion zone, where there had not been any humans for over 30 years. It was left by its residents due to the nuclear accident, and the respondents were encountered by this untouched radioactive nature, which was striving and exciting due to the lack of the presence of the human population. It added a layer to the visitor’s imagination:

When you are there, you really have this feeling like a box of Pandora in the room, because everything is empty over there and you have the feeling it could be there. You know it is not there, but your imagination starts to work there. (Respondent 11)

Plate 5 exemplifies aptly these visitors’ spatial practices. What is descriptive in the picture is not only the adventure it wishes to communicate; portraying the group of unofficial visitors under the starry night sky, but it challenges the other visitors’ choreographies in the area and the commonly held understanding of the area as polluted and dangerous.

Although the story of Stalker as portrayed by Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers was not familiar to all interviewees, their accounts underline this cultural reference familiar to and typical for the last years of the Soviet Block, given its atmosphere of impending destruction and mystical hopes for a better life.

The zone gave a sense of mystery and adventure in the lives of the respondents, and their storytelling emphasises the peculiarities of the mythical zone : mirroring, disturbing and strangely comforting, as an intense bodily experience ( Plate 6 ).

Conclusions

This study found three storytelling themes as the result of visitors’ engagements with the CEZ: the tale of mighty nature, the tale of apocalyptic afterness and the tale of the mythical zone , through which visitors focus their understanding of the site and their visitors’ subjectivities. The approach outlined in this article can assist in better understanding the networks of co-constitution of different visitor profiles through storytelling in the context of urban tourism settings. The present study indicates that the tourists are not merely forwarding the narratives of the given site; they are telling stories about themselves as visitors in the exclusion zone.

By choosing a tour, making pictures of the site, contextualising them in relation to the place and other visitors’ subjectivities, visitors of the exclusion zone are not merely reflecting the place. Instead, through digital photographs and tour choices, they enact the place’s imaginative narratives; they actively bring it into public view; and participate in the making of Chernobyl’s tourismscape and its radioactive heritage ( Hryhorczuk, 2019 ). The individually framed storytelling formats due to the tour choice and the opportunities for spatial exploration in the zone are defining contextual parameters that shape the storytelling in a distinctive way.

This study has contributed to the literature on urban tourism generally as it directs the focus towards the networks of co-constitution of tourismscapes, where multiple imaginaries are used to compose a novel texture of place ( Dürr et al. , 2021 ). Through the patterns of storytelling, visitors become involved in the composition of the social and cultural imaginaries of the tourist site. The tour choices supplemented with the visitors’ photographs capture the narratives of the place, which integrate these experiential articulations into “ongoing social and collective memory practices” ( Bareither, 2021 , p. 588). These shifting frameworks of storytelling, which through experiencing, viewing and documenting are taking place, can be used in further studies on urban tourism to elaborate on the ways these discursive spaces may articulate meta-social commentaries that reproduce and challenge social norms and conventions ( Edensor, 2000 ; Geertz, 1993 ). The multi-layered storyscapes are entangled with the constellations of visitors and comprise changing forms of representation.

Further research and practical insights

This research provides detailed knowledge for further consideration of how such contested heritage is viewed and interpreted by visitors. This study answered the call to study the storytelling and narrative engagement of different consumption profiles ( Lennon, 2018 ) from the point of view of visitors and deepened the analysis by combining visitors’ verbal and visual storytelling. Further studies would benefit from the model outlined in this paper by investigating how visitors weave their experiences into stories and how the stories are placed within the wider context of a given tourist site. A closer look into intersectionality within the visitor categories, such as nationality, gender and age, would enrich the understanding of the consumption dynamics in the tourismscape. The interconnectedness of different consumer accounts would be an interesting path to follow, as would the elaboration of their verbally and visually entangled discursive spaces.

For the tour providers, a detailed look into visitors' on-site interactions enriches knowledge of mutually constituted consumption experiences and enhances the picture of visitors’ storytelling and the way the site is being enriched, coloured and contested by the visitors. This study elaborates on visitors’ negotiation processes in search of autonomy and freedom and the resulting spatial implications of these engagements.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The Pripyat Ferris wheel

chernobyl tourism statistics

Bumper cars in Pripyat amusement park

chernobyl tourism statistics

Pripyat’s barber shop

chernobyl tourism statistics

Golden Key Kindergarten in Pripyat

chernobyl tourism statistics

Unofficial visitors rest while hiking through the zone

chernobyl tourism statistics

On the roof top in Pripyat

The profile of qualitative interviews n = 40

(*) If a respondent had visited the exclusion zone with several type of tours, the category equals the one that respondent preferred.

(**) If a respondent had visited the exclusion zone more than once, the category equals the year of first visit.

M = male, F = female,

B = businessperson, CE = company employee, NS = national service, P = professional, S = student

Source: Author’s data

Balomenou , N. , & Garrod , B. ( 2016 ). A review of participant-generated image methods in the social sciences . Journal of Mixed Methods Research , 10 ( 4 ), 335 – 351 .

Banaszkiewicz , M. , Kruczek , Z. , & Duda , A. ( 2017 ). The Chernobyl exclusion zone as a tourist attraction: Reflections on the turistification of the zone . Folia Turistica , 44 , 145 – 169 .

Bareither , C. ( 2021 ). Capture the feeling: Memory practices in between the emotional affordances of heritage sites and digital media . Memory Studies , 14 ( 3 ), 578 – 591 .

Bryman , A. ( 2016 ). Social research methods ( 5th ed. ). Italy : Oxford University Press .

Çakar , K. , & Aykol , Ş. ( 2021 ). Case study as a research method in hospitality and tourism research: A systematic literature review (1974–2020) . Cornell Hospitality Quarterly , 62 ( 1 ) 21 .

Chernousenko , V. ( 1991 ). Chernobyl: insight from the inside , Berlin : Springer .

Chronis , A. ( 2005 ). Coconstructing heritage at the gettysburg storyscape . Annals of Tourism Research , 32 ( 2 ), 386 – 406 .

Chronis , A. ( 2012 ). Between place and story: Gettysburg as tourism imaginary . Annals of Tourism Research , 39 ( 4 ), 1797 – 1816 .

Chronis , A. , Arnould , E. J. , & Hampton , R. D. ( 2012 ). Gettysburg re-imagined: The role of narrative imagination in consumption experience . Consumption Markets & Culture , 15 ( 3 ), 261 – 286 .

Dobraszczyk , P. ( 2010 ). Petrified ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the death of the city . City , 14 ( 4 ), 370 – 389 .

Dürr , E. , Acosta , R. , & Vodopivec , B. ( 2021 ). Recasting urban imaginaries: Politicized temporalities and the touristification of a notorious Mexico city barrio . International Journal of Tourism Cities, 7 , 7 ( 3 ), 783 – 798 .

Edensor , T. ( 2000 ). Staging tourism: Tourists as performers . Annals of Tourism Research , 27 ( 2 ), 322 – 344 .

Farkić , J. ( 2020 ). Consuming dystopic places: What answers are we looking for? Tourism Management Perspectives , 33 , 1 – 8 . doi: 10.1016/j.tmp.2019.100633 .

Farkić , J. , & Kennell , J. ( 2021 ). Consuming dark sites via street art: Murals at Chernobyl . Annals of Tourism Research , 90 , 1 – 13 . doi: 10.1016/j.annals.2021.103256 .

Foley , M. , & Lennon , J. ( 1996 ). JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination . International Journal of Heritage Studies , 2 ( 4 ), 198 – 211 .

Geertz , C. ( 1993 ). Deep play: Notes on the balinese cockfight . Daedelus of Cultures: Selected Essays , 101 , 1 – 37 .

Grbich , C. ( 2013 ). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction ( 2nd ed. ). Croydon : Sage Publications .

Gusterson , H. ( 2004 ). Nuclear tourism . Journal for Cultural Research , 8 ( 1 ), 23 – 31 .

Hartmann , R. ( 2014 ). Dark tourism, thanatourism, and dissonance in heritage tourism management: New directions in contemporary tourism research . Journal of Heritage Tourism , 9 ( 2 ), 166 – 182 .

Hryhorczuk , N. ( 2019 ). Radioactive heritage: The universal value of Chernobyl as a dark heritage site . Qualitative Inquiry , 25 ( 9-10 ), 1047 – 1055 .

Hutching , T. , & Linden , K. ( 2018 ). Tourists at Chernobyl: Existential meaning and digital media . In M. , Frihammar , & H. , Silverman (Eds). Heritage of death: Landscapes, emotion and practice (pp. 209 – 221 ). London : Routledge .

Kužnik , L. , & Veble , N. ( 2018 ). Into the dark – dark stories in the cities of Brežice and Krško in Slovenia as a basis for the future dark tourism products . International Journal of Tourism Cities , 4 ( 1 ), 40 – 53 .

Lennon , J. ( 2017 ). Dark tourism sites: Visualization, evidence and visitation . Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes , 9 ( 2 ), 216 – 227 .

Lennon , J. ( 2018 ). Kanchanaburi and the Thai-Burma railway: Disputed narratives in the interpretation of war . International Journal of Tourism Cities , 4 ( 1 ), 140 – 155 .

Lennon , J. , & Powell , R. ( 2018 ). Dark tourism and cities . International Journal of Tourism Cities , 4 ( 1 ), 1 – 3 .

Light , D. ( 2017 ). Progress in dark tourism and thanatourism research: An uneasy relationship with heritage tourism . Tourism Management , 61 , 275 – 301 .

Medvedev , Z. ( 1990 ). The legacy of Chernobyl , New York, NY : Norton .

Olson , R. ( 2016 ). Thinking about narrative . In D. , Britton , & D. , Pellegrini (Eds). Narrative thought and narrative language, psychology (pp. 99 – 112 ). New York, NY : Press .

Podoshen , J. , Venkatesh , V. , Wallin , J. , Andrzejewski , S. , & Jin , Z. ( 2015 ). Dystopian dark tourism: An exploratory examination . Tourism Management , 51 , 316 – 328 .

Robbie , D. ( 2008 ). Touring katrina: Authentic identities and disaster tourism in new orleans . Journal of Heritage Tourism , 3 ( 4 ), 257 – 266 .

Rose , G. ( 2016 ). Visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials , Los Angeles, CA : Sage .

Rush-Cooper , N. ( 2020 ). Nuclear landscape: Tourism, embodiment and exposure in the Chernobyl zone . Cultural Geographies , 27 ( 2 ), 217 – 235 .

Saldaña , J. ( 2016 ). The coding manual for qualitative researchers ( 3rd ed. ). Los Angeles, CA, London, New Delhi, Washington, DC : Sage .

Seaton , A. ( 1996 ). Guided by the dark: From thanatopsis to thanatourism . International Journal of Heritage Studies , 2 ( 4 ), 234 – 244 .

Šešić , M. , & Mijatović , L. ( 2014 ). Balkan dissonant heritage narratives (and their attractiveness) for tourism . American Journal of Tourism Management , 3 ( 1B ), 10 – 19 . doi: 10.5923/s.tourism.201402.02 .

Sigala , M. , & Steriopoulos , E. ( 2021 ). Does emotional engagement matter in dark tourism?, implications drawn from a reflective approach . Journal of Heritage Tourism , 16 ( 4 ), 412 – 432 .

Stone , P. ( 2013 ). Dark tourism, heterotopias and post-apocalyptic places: The case of Chernobyl . In L. , White , & E. , Frew (Eds). Dark tourism and place identity: Managing and interpreting dark places (pp. 79 – 93 ). London : Routledge .

Strugatskii , A. & Strugatskii , B. ( 1978 ). Roadside picnic , Science Fiction Book Club .

Tercia , C. , Teichert , T. , Sirad , D. A. , & Murniadi , K. ( 2022 ). Storytelling in the communication of dark tourism . Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality , 17 ( 1 ), 107 – 126 . doi: 10.1108/CBTH-06-2021-0152 .

Tunbridge , J. , & Ashworth , G. ( 1996 ). Dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict , Chichester : John Wiley .

Yankovska , G. , & Hannam , K. ( 2013 ). Dark and toxic tourism in the Chernobyl exclusion zone . Current Issues in Tourism , 17 ( 10 ), 929 – 939 .

Yankovska , G. , & Hannam , K. ( 2018 ). Tourism mobilities and the hauntings of Chernobyl . In P. Stone , R. Hartmann , T. Seaton , R. Sharpley , & L. White (Eds). The palgrave handbook of dark tourism studies (pp. 319 – 333 ). London : Palgrave Handbooks .

Electronic source

UrbexTour ( 2022 ). Chernobyl urbex tour . Retrieved from www.urbextour.com/en/chernobyl-urbex-tour/ (accessed 18 April 2022 ).

Acknowledgements

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Corresponding author

About the author.

Veera Ojala is based at Department of Humanities, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Related articles

We’re listening — tell us what you think, something didn’t work….

Report bugs here

All feedback is valuable

Please share your general feedback

Join us on our journey

Platform update page.

Visit emeraldpublishing.com/platformupdate to discover the latest news and updates

Questions & More Information

Answers to the most commonly asked questions here

  • Entertainment

How the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. inspired a wave of real-world Chernobyl tourists

A virtual world leads to irl excursions.

By Darmon Richter

Illustration by Alex Castro

Share this story

chernobyl tourism statistics

At the entrance to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, 35 years on from the worst nuclear disaster in history, a yellow souvenir van sells T-shirts, key rings, and glow-in-the-dark “Chernobyl condoms,” all branded with gas mask symbols or stylized radiation warning signs.

They sell hot dogs and coffee. There’s “Chernobyl ice cream,” advertised by colorful signs reminiscent of the Raygun Gothic style of atomic-era Americana. As I join the other tourists and queue for a coffee, speakers play “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” by The Ink Spots, a track lifted straight from the soundtrack of Fallout 3 . By the time I finish my drink I’m listening to Doris Day croon: “Again… this couldn’t happen again / This is that once in a lifetime / This is the thrill divine.”

In May 2019, HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl became an unprecedented hit. The real Chernobyl Zone saw a record number of 124,000 visitors that year, and many commentators suggested the HBO show had caused a sudden Chernobyl tourism boom. In reality, though, queues at the Chernobyl checkpoint had been growing at a consistent rate for a decade prior — and the touristification of Chernobyl owed at least as much to video games as it did to television.

In 2007, two games were released that imprinted Chernobyl into the minds of a whole generation of gamers. In the West, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a blockbuster. It featured a stealth mission titled “All Ghillied Up,” which was set in Pripyat, the abandoned workers’ city that stands alongside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The mission opens with panoramic shots of Pripyat’s deserted housing blocks, while a voiceover intones: “50,000 people used to live here. Now it’s a ghost town.” This Chernobyl setting lent Call of Duty a new dimension of danger and intrigue; it created a strong visual impression, although, really, the gameplay that followed could have been located practically anywhere.

The same cannot be said for S.T.A.L.K.E.R . 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Ukrainian studio GSC Game World released S.T.A.L.K.E.R .: Shadow of Chernobyl the same year Call of Duty 4 came out, but while both featured first-person shooter gameplay set in Chernobyl, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ’s case it was more than just stage dressing. S.T.A.L.K.E.R . introduced players to a world in which the landscape — the mysterious “Zone” — became a character in its own right. This was partly the result of an innovative global AI system that created the sense of a living, breathing world: non-player characters would interact, fight, strum guitars, or fend off packs of rabid dogs, with or without the player being present. Immersion was heightened by the lack of a fast travel option, forcing players to spend an awful lot of time looking at the ever-changing scenery. But the personification of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ’s terrain ran deeper still, as it was rooted in the game’s mythos, which tapped into older ideas from Soviet-era science fiction. 

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker was a dreamlike meditation on desire and ruination, in which an almost shamanic figure, known as “Stalker,” leads two tourists through the post-industrial landscapes of a mysterious, sentient Zone to find the Room at its center where a visitor’s wishes could be granted. However, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. shares more DNA with Roadside Picnic , the 1972 novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, which inspired Tarkovsky’s film. The protagonist of Roadside Picnic is just one of many stalkers. In the wake of some unexplained extraterrestrial event, areas of the Earth’s surface have been contaminated by alien energies. These areas are evacuated to form military-guarded “Zones,” and the “stalkers” are the scavengers who venture illegally inside to hunt for valuable alien artifacts left scattered across this strange and toxic landscape.

“Chernobyl gave us that rich atmosphere, and huge lore possibilities.” 

To adapt this world for the medium of games, GSC Game World gave their stalkers assault rifles, created rival factions, and populated the wasteland with corrupted wildlife: mutated dogs, boars, and worse. The Zone of the game borrows the novel’s alien “anomalies” — invisible traps that shoot jets of flame or catapult unwary travelers into the sky — and at the center, as in both the book and the film, lies the mysterious promise of a “Wish Granter.” But the developers also made the bold decision of placing this literary Zone inside Ukraine’s own real-life Exclusion Zone: the 1,000-square mile region of evacuated farms and villages that surrounds the Chernobyl Plant.

I asked GSC Game World’s PR manager, Zakhar Bocharov, how that decision came about. “Several locations were considered for the game,” he explains, “but Chernobyl just clicked at a certain point as the perfect setting for this story. It was the decision of Sergiy Grygorovych, the game’s director, and then everything came together around that idea. Chernobyl gave us that rich atmosphere, and huge lore possibilities.” 

Long before the game, the fictional works of Tarkovsky and the Strugatskys had sometimes been described as seeming almost prophetic of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the real-life Zone that was established in its wake. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was born into a narrative space already carved out by urban myths and conspiracy theories. “Our core team is Ukrainian, so everything that happened at Chernobyl was very familiar and personal for us,” says Bocharov. “The idea of telling a story in this space came organically — just with certain tweaks, like an altered history and sci-fi elements.”

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was a phenomenal success: it earned critical acclaim around the world and sold a reported 2 million copies in its first year. A prequel ( Clear Sky ) and sequel ( Call of Pripyat ) soon followed. These games built a cult following, particularly in Eastern Europe. They inspired live-action roleplay events, themed airsoft tournaments, and festivals such as the 2009 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Fest in Kyiv. It was only a matter of time before the game’s influence reached Chernobyl itself.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

In 2019, I interviewed Yaroslav Yemelianenko, the co-founder of Chernobyl Tour, one of the dozen or so companies that offer trips inside the Chernobyl Zone. He told me how his own interest in Chernobyl started with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.… and then, realizing that the “real Zone” could be visited just nearby, he joined a tour to Pripyat. By 2008, he had established his own company, and one of their early offerings was a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -themed tour visiting locations from the game. The souvenir van at the entrance to the Zone belongs to Chernobyl Tour, too. Whereas the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was once exclusively controlled by Soviet-style bureaucrats, there is a sense now that a new generation is taking over — and increasingly, they offer a Chernobyl experience that delivers on expectations set by pop culture references. 

However, not all S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans are looking for that group tour experience. Stepan (who, for privacy, prefers not to use his full name) is one of a growing number of young Ukrainians who visit the Chernobyl Zone illegally. Many call themselves “stalkers.” On his trips, Stepan carries food and water, a first-aid kit, and a cheap radiation meter he purchased online. He says it takes him three days to hike from the Zone’s perimeter fence to Pripyat, a journey that mirrors the player’s progress through the game world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. Just like Yemelianenko, Stepan’s interest in the real Zone started with the game.

“It felt more real than other games I had played.”

“When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. came out, it was something really new and exciting for me. Not just because it was set in my country… but also because it felt more real than other games I had played. I wasn’t some magical hero, or ‘chosen one,’ you know? Just some random guy, taking on a big hostile world. I could relate to that.” Stepan adds, however, that he abandoned the game after becoming a real stalker. “Playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. made me curious to see these places in real life. But now that I know the real Zone, I can’t imagine going back to the game’s version.”

Chernobyl Tour believes that with the right marketing and itineraries, it can tempt S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans to join its groups instead. Its chief deputy Kateryna Aslamova explains: “In many cases, people enter illegally to visit places they can’t see on regular tours. Occasionally, I have ex-stalkers on my tours ... now, with all the choice we offer, they realize there’s no longer a reason to go illegally.” 

But Stepan is not convinced. “Firstly, the legal entry fees are a little more difficult when you’re earning Ukrainian wages,” he says. “But mainstream tourism will never capture the feeling of exploring the wild Zone. When I go there, I want to hear the forest … to be alone with my thoughts in a place beyond the noise and rules of normal life. To be completely responsible for my own fate. This is a really unique and special experience … you would never get this on a legal tour, surrounded by people, buses, guides, and souvenir shops.”

Other guides take a more agnostic approach toward the activities of illegal tourists, believing there’s space for stalkers and tour companies to coexist in the Zone. Yevhen Chkalov was a junior game designer on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. , whose responsibilities included developing and scripting some of the game’s side missions. Nowadays he leads tours in the real Chernobyl Zone and runs the online fan community Bar Apocalypse, which caters to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and two of its offspring, the Metro and Survarium franchises.

“Stalking and tourism are two sides of the same coin,” Chkalov tells me. “Some visitors want the extreme experience and full atmosphere … others just want to see the Zone without all the hard work. I used to be a stalker myself, just like many other legal guides were. I have a good relationship with the stalkers now. They recommend my services to those who can’t manage the long hike. And I send them the people who don’t feel satisfied by what’s offered on the legal experience.”

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

There were stalkers in the Zone before 2007, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gave them a shared identity — the basis of a subculture — and Chkalov says the majority of stalkers today were inspired by the games. Though some are in for a surprise: “They play some games and decide they want to try this experience in real life … but then they find out that hiking for days and days is a little harder than just pressing the ‘W’ button. It’s serious physical activity. That’s why so many stalkers surrender themselves to the police.” At present, the penalty for being caught in the Zone illegally is the equivalent of a $20 fine, after which the authorities typically drive the trespassers back to the police station in Ivankiv, a town outside the perimeter fence. “In the Zone, we call this ‘the taxi to Ivankiv,’” Chkalov jokes.

In 2018, I decided to join one of these stalker trips. A Ukrainian guide led us chest-deep through a river to enter the Zone, then for four days we hiked through wild, wooded landscapes between run-down villages and the shells of former farms and factories. The parallels to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were occasionally quite surreal. Inventory management was a serious issue, our backpacks stuffed with first-aid kits, bread and salamis, just like in the game. We couldn’t carry all the water we’d need, but our stalker guide had his friends hide supply stashes ahead of us, for which they shared a list of coordinates. It became a kind of orienteering mission, always hiking toward the next stash pinned on our electronic maps. When we finally reached Pripyat on the fourth night; the experience of stepping out of forest and into a whole deserted city was just as exhilarating and cathartic a reward as it was to reach the virtual Pripyat after hours of wandering through S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ’s version of this Zone. 

Concept art for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.

It is easy to see why so many former gamers have joined the ranks of the real-life stalkers since 2007: this feels like the ultimate live-action roleplay experience, a true physical immersion into the game’s world, complete with many of the dangers that entails. Zakhar Bocharov tells me that while GSC Game World appreciates S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ’s passionate fan base, the developers themselves do not endorse illegal tourism in the real Zone. He stresses the many dangers and says the company would always recommend visitors to join a legal tour instead. Though he also acknowledges, “our words would hardly change anything.”

With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 scheduled to release in 2021, the developers have lately been spending more time in Chernobyl themselves. “The Zone is changing constantly,” says Bocharov. “Our core team visits every couple of months, or even more often. Sometimes it’s for photogrammetry work, and sometimes just for inspiration. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will include new locations along with the old ones — in a seamless open world for the first time in the series.”

“The Zone is changing constantly.”

When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. came out in 2007, Ukraine didn’t even recognize Chernobyl as a tourism destination. Security was far less stringent than it is today, and the Zone was a playground for looters and poachers, stalkers and bandits — “a symbol of corruption,” according to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy . But the real and virtual Zones are gradually diverging and in 2019, Zelenskyy signed a decree for the development of the territory, promising to create “a green corridor for tourists,” while stamping out corruption. “We must give this territory of Ukraine a new life,” he stated, during a visit to the Zone. “Until now, Chernobyl was a negative part of Ukraine’s brand. It’s time to change it.”

From the state’s perspective, the stalkers are very much a part of that old image. In September 2020, the Verkhovna Rada — Ukraine’s parliament — was presented a proposal for amendments to the law concerning trespassing in the Chernobyl Zone . If passed, this bill would upgrade stalking from an administrative offense to a criminal offense under Ukrainian law. The current $20 fee for a “taxi to Ivankiv” would increase by a factor of a hundred and be backed by the threat of jail time. 

Sitting at the Chernobyl checkpoint with my coffee, I watch five minibuses and two coaches roll past into the Zone. The recent upgrade from analog printed checklists to a digital barcoded ticketing system has dramatically increased the rate at which visitors can be admitted. As video game soundtracks play in the background, one group stops to shop for souvenirs; they’re Polish tourists, and four of them are wearing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. T-shirts. This regulated, streamlined new version of Chernobyl tourism is better for business, it’s better for Ukraine, and it means that by the time S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 arrives, any would-be trespassers are going to find it harder than ever to access the Zone. Nevertheless, Yevhen Chkalov predicts that the stalkers won’t be giving up anytime soon. 

“There was an illegal tourism boom directly after the success of the first game,” he points out. “When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 releases, you can expect another wave.”

The Nintendo DS emulator Drastic is now free as Yuzu lawsuit fallout begins

Rivian r2 launch event: the ev company’s more affordable suv is here, apple kills epic’s ios game store plans over app store criticism, openai says elon musk wanted ‘absolute control’ of the company, microsoft ai engineer warns ftc about copilot designer safety concerns.

Sponsor logo

More from Entertainment

Stock image illustration featuring the Nintendo logo stamped in black on a background of tan, blue, and black color blocking.

The Nintendo Switch 2 will now reportedly arrive in 2025 instead of 2024

Apple AirPods Pro

The best Presidents Day deals you can already get

An image announcing Vudu’s rebranding to Fandango at Home.

Vudu’s name is changing to ‘Fandango at Home’

US video games soundtrack composer Tommy

Tommy Tallarico’s never-actually-featured-on-MTV-Cribs house is for sale

Dark tourism: when tragedy meets tourism

The likes of auschwitz, ground zero and chernobyl are seeing increasing numbers of visitors, sparking the term 'dark tourism'. but is it voyeuristic or educational.

Several tour companies exist to send visitors to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and ghost town left ...

Several tour companies exist to send visitors to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and ghost town left otherwise empty after the nuclear accident in 1986.

Days after 71 people died in a London tower block fire last June, something strange started to happen in the streets around it. Posters, hastily drawn by members of the grieving community of Grenfell Tower, appeared on fences and lamp posts in view of the building's blackened husk.

'Grenfell: A Tragedy Not A Tourist Attraction,' one read, adding — sarcastically — a hashtag and the word 'selfies'. As families still searched for missing inhabitants of the 24-storey block, and the political shock waves were being felt through the capital, people had started to arrive in North Kensington to take photos. Some were posing in selfie mode.

"It's not the Eiffel Tower," one resident told the BBC after the posters attracted the attention of the press. "You don't take a picture." Weeks later, local people were dismayed when a coachload of Chinese tourists pulled up nearby so that its occupants could get out and take photos.

Grenfell Tower, which still dominates the surrounding skyline (it's due to be demolished in late 2018), had become a site for 'dark tourism', a loose label for any sort of tourism that involves visiting places that owe their notoriety to death, disaster, an atrocity or what can also loosely be termed 'difficult heritage'.

It's a phenomenon that's on the rise as established sites such as Auschwitz and the September 11 museum in Manhattan enjoy record visitor numbers. Meanwhile, demand is rising among those more intrepid dark tourists who want to venture to the fallout zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima, as well as North Korea and Rwanda. In Sulawesi, Indonesia, Western tourists wielding GoPros pay to watch elaborate funeral ceremonies in the Toraja region, swapping notes afterwards on TripAdvisor.

Along the increasingly crowded dark-tourist trail, academics, tour operators and the residents of many destinations are asking searching questions about the ethics of modern tourism in an age of the selfie and the Instagram hashtag. When Pompeii, a dark tourist site long before the phrase existed, found itself on the Grand Tour of young European nobility in the 18th century, dozens of visitors scratched their names into its excavated walls. Now we leave our mark in different ways, but where should we draw the boundaries?

Questions like these have become the life's work of Dr Philip Stone , perhaps the world's leading academic expert on dark tourism. He has a background in business and marketing, and once managed a holiday camp in Scotland. But a fascination with societal attitudes to mortality led to a PhD in thanatology, the study of death, and a focus on tourism.

"I'm not even a person who enjoys going to these places," Stone says from the University of Central Lancashire, where he runs the Institute for Dark Tourism Research. "But what I am interested in is the way people face their own mortality by looking at other deaths of significance. Because we've become quite divorced from death yet we have this kind of packaging up of mortality in the visit economy which combines business, sociology, psychology under the banner of dark tourism. It's really fascinating to shine a light on that."

Historical roots

The term 'dark tourism' is far newer than the practice, which long predates Pompeii's emergence as a morbid attraction. Stone considers the Roman Colosseum to be one of the first dark tourist sites, where people travelled long distances to watch death as sport. Later, until the late 18th century, the appeal was starker still in central London, where people paid money to sit in grandstands to watch mass executions. Hawkers would sell pies at the site, which was roughly where Marble Arch stands today.

It was only in 1996 that 'dark tourism' entered the scholarly lexicon when two academics in Glasgow applied it while looking at sites associated with the assassination of JFK. Those who study dark tourism identify plenty of reasons for the growing phenomenon, including raised awareness of it as an identifiable thing. Access to sites has also improved with the advent of cheap air travel. It's hard to imagine that the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum would now welcome more than two million visitors a year (an average of almost 5,500 a day, more than two-thirds of whom travel to the Polish site from other countries in Europe) were it not for its proximity to Krakow's international airport.

Peter Hohenhaus, a widely travelled dark tourist based in Vienna, also points to the broader rise in off-the-beaten track tourism, beyond the territory of popular guidebooks and TripAdvisor rankings. "A lot of people don't want mainstream tourism and that often means engaging with places that have a more recent history than, say, a Roman ruin," he says. "You go to Sarajevo and most people remember the war being in the news so it feels closer to one's own biography."

Hohenhaus is also a fan of 'beauty in decay', the contemporary cultural movement in which urban ruins have become subject matter for expensive coffee-table books and a thousand Instagram accounts. The crossover with death is clear. "I've always been drawn to derelict things," the 54-year-old says. As a child in Hamburg, he would wonder at the destruction of war still visible around the city's harbour.

That childhood interest has developed into an obsession; Hohenhaus has visited 650 dark tourist sites in 90 countries, logging them all and more besides on his website . He has plans to put together the first dark tourism guidebook. His favourite holiday destination today is Chernobyl and its 'photogenic' ghost town. "You get to time travel back into the Soviet era but also into an apocalyptic future," he says. He also enjoys being emotionally challenged by these places. "I went to Treblinka in 2008 and heard the story of a teacher at an orphanage in Warsaw who was offered a chance to escape but refused and went with his children to the gas chambers. Stories like that are not everyday, you mull over them. Would you have done that?"

But while, like any tourism, dark tourism at its best is thought-provoking and educational, the example of Grenfell Tower hints at the unease felt at some sites about what can look like macabre voyeurism. "I remember the Lonely Planet Bluelist book had a chapter about dark tourism a while ago and one of the rules was 'don't go back too early'," Hohenhaus says. "But that's easier said than calculated. You have to be very aware of reactions and be discreet when you're not in a place with an entrance fee and a booklet." Hohenhaus said he had already thought about Grenfell Tower and admits he would be interested to see it up close. "It's big, it's dramatic, it's black and it's a story you've followed in the news," he says. "I can see the attraction. But I would not stand in the street taking a selfie."

A mirror to mortality

An urge to see and feel a place that has been reduced to disaster shorthand by months of media coverage is perhaps understandable, but Stone is most interested in the draw — conscious or otherwise — of destinations that hold up a mirror to our own mortality. "When we touch the memory of people who've gone what we're looking at is ourselves," he says. "That could have been us in that bombing or atrocity. We make relevant our own mortality." That process looks different across cultures — and generations — and Stone says we should take this into account before despairing of selfie takers at Grenfell Tower or Auschwitz.

"I've heard residents at Grenfell welcoming visitors because it keeps the disaster in the public realm, but they didn't like people taking photos because it's a visual reminder that you're a tourist and therefore somehow defunct of morality," he explains. "We're starting to look at selfies now. Are they selfish?" Stone argues that the language of social media means we no longer say "I was here", but "I am here — see me". He adds: "We live in a secular society where morality guidelines are increasingly blurred. It's easy for us to say that's right or wrong, but for many people it's not as simple as that."

"Travel itself is innately voyeuristic," argues Simon Cockerel, the general manager of Koryo Tours , a North Korea specialist based in Beijing. Cockerel, who has lived in China for 17 years and joined Koryo in 2002, says demand has grown dramatically for trips to Pyongyang and beyond, from 200 people a year in the mid 1990s, when the company started, to more than 5,000 more recently. He has visited the country more than 165 times and says some clients join his tours simply to bag another country, and some for bragging rights. But the majority have a genuine interest in discovering a country — and a people — beyond the headlines.

"I've found everyone who goes there to be sensitive and aware of the issues," he says. "The restrictions do create a framework for it to be a bit like a theme park visit but we work hard to blur those boundaries. More than 25 million people live in North Korea, and 24.99 million of them have nothing to do with what we read in the news and deserve to be seen as people not as zoo animals or lazy caricatures."

More challenging recently has been the US ban on its citizens going to North Korea, imposed last summer after the mysterious death of Otto Warmbier. The American student had been arrested in Pyongyang after being accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster. Americans made up about 20% of Koryo's business, but Cockerel argues the greater loss is to mutual perception in the countries. "The North Korean government represent Americans as literal wolves with sharpened nails," he says. "At least a few hundred Americans going there was a kind of bridgehead against that. Now that's gone."

At Grenfell Tower, responsible tourism may yet serve to keep alive the memory of the disaster, just as it does, after a dignified moratorium, at Auschwitz and the former Ground Zero. Hohenhaus says he will resist the urge to go until some sort of memorial is placed at the site of the tower. At around the time of a commemorative service at St Paul's Cathedral six months after the fire, there were calls for the site eventually to be turned into a memorial garden. The extent to which Hohenhaus and other dark tourists are welcomed will be decided by the people still living there.

Five of the world's dark tourism sites

1. North Korea Opened to visitors in the late 1980s, North Korea now attracts thousands of tourists each year for a peek behind the headlines.

2. Auschwitz-Birkenau The former Nazi death camp became a memorial in 1947 and a museum in 1955. It's grown since and in 2016 attracted a record two million visitors.

3. 9/11 Memorial and Museum Built in the crater left by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the museum, opened in 2014, has won plaudits for its portrayal of a disaster and its impact.

4. Rwanda Visitor numbers to genocide memorials have grown in Cambodia and Bosnia as well as in Rwanda, where there are several sites dedicated to the 1994 massacre of up to a million people. The skulls of victims are displayed.

5. Chernobyl & Pripyat, Ukraine Several tour companies exist to send visitors to the exclusion zone and ghost town left otherwise empty after the nuclear accident in 1986. All are scanned for radiation as they leave.

Published in the March 2018 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK)

Find us on social media

Facebook | Instagram  |  Twitter

  • Living History
  • Modern History
  • Cultural Tourism
  • Environment and Conservation
  • Travel and Adventure

clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

Ukraine wants Chernobyl to be a tourist trap. But scientists warn: Don’t kick up dust.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The tourists first started flocking to Chernobyl nearly 10 years ago, when fans of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wanted to see firsthand the nuclear wasteland they’d visited in virtual reality.

Next came those whose curiosity piqued when in 2016 the giant steel dome known as the New Safe Confinement was slid over the sarcophagus encasing nuclear reactor number four, which exploded in April 1986, spewed radiation across Europe and forced hundreds of thousands to flee from their homes.

Then in May, HBO’s “Chernobyl” miniseries aired, and tourism companies reported a 30 to 40 percent uptick in visitors to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, abandoned and eerily frozen in time.

Now the Ukrainian government — capitalizing on the macabre intrigue — has announced that Chernobyl will become an official tourist site, complete with routes, waterways, checkpoints and a “green corridor” that will place it on the map with other “dark tourism” destinations.

“We must give this territory of Ukraine a new life," President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a visit to Chernobyl this week. “Until now, Chernobyl was a negative part of Ukraine’s brand. It’s time to change it.”

Zelensky, who was inaugurated in May, signed a decree July 10 to kickstart the Chernobyl Development Strategy, which the president hopes will bring order to the 19-mile Exclusion Zone that has become a hotbed for corruption, trespassing and theft. At the nuclear facility and in the nearby town of Pripyat, wildlife has returned and now roams freely. Flora and fauna grow up around decaying homes, playgrounds and an amusement park. Letters, dinner tables and baby dolls remain where their owners abandoned them 33 years ago.

Radioactive dust still coats it all.

“Chernobyl is a unique place on the planet where nature revives after a global man-made disaster, where there is a real ‘ghost town,'” Zelensky said during his visit. “We have to show this place to the world: scientists, ecologists, historians, tourists.”

Though exploiting a historical space like Chernobyl could infuse Ukraine’s economy with tourism dollars and motivate developers to revive the sleepy towns surrounding the “dead zone,” there are significant downsides, experts say.

Thanks to HBO, more tourists are flocking to the eerie Chernobyl nuclear disaster site

The grounds remain coated with plutonium, cesium, strontium and americium — radionuclides (atoms that emit radiation) that could pose potentially serious health risks to those who touch or ingest them. Some areas are more radioactive, and therefore more dangerous, than others.

“Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident in human history,” said Jim Beasley, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who has been studying wildlife in the Exclusion Zone since 2012. “Even though the accident occurred over 33 years ago it remains one of the most radiologically contaminated places on earth.”

More than 30 people were killed in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, and officials are still debating the full extent of the longterm death toll in Ukraine and nearby countries where people grew sick with cancer and other illnesses.

The World Health Organization estimates total cancer deaths at 9,000, far less than a Belarusian study that put the death toll at 115,000, reported Reuters .

Today, radiation levels inside the Exclusion Zone vary widely from location to location, said Dr. T. Steen, who teaches microbiology and immunology at Georgetown’s School of Medicine and oversees radiation research in organisms at nuclear disaster sites. Because of that, she advises anyone visiting to be educated and cautious while inside the Exclusion Zone, and to limit time spent there.

“The longer you’re exposed, the more that future impact is,” she said.

She advises visitors to the Exclusion Zone to wear clothes and shoes they are comfortable throwing away. If they’re going to be touching or disturbing anything, she recommends a mask and gloves. Most importantly, Steen says, Chernobyl tourists should avoid plant life, and especially the depths of the forests.

Those areas were not cleaned in the aftermath of the disaster and remain highly contaminated by radiation. Research has showed that the fungus, moss and mushrooms growing there are radioactive. Eating or drinking from the area is not safe.

Those who stay on the paved pathways, which officials cleaned, are much less likely to absorb harmful toxins.

Generally speaking, Chernobyl can be safe, Steen said, “but it depends on how people behave.”

And so far, the accounts of tourists behaving badly are abundant.

Timothy Mousseau, a biologist and University of South Carolina professor, has been studying the ecological and evolutionary consequences of radioactive contaminants on wildlife and organisms at Chernobyl for 20 years. He just recently returned from his annual, month-long trip to the Exclusion Zone and said he was shocked to see 250 tourists in street clothes wandering Pripyat.

Some hopped in bumper cars at the abandoned amusement park there to take selfies.

"Part of the reason people don’t think twice about it is because there is this highly organized tourism operation,” Mousseau said. “A lot of people don’t give it a second thought.”

He is concerned that the government’s tourism campaign could only make that worse.

“The negative aspects that are being completely ignored are the health and safety issues of bringing this many people, exposing this many people to what is a small risk, albeit a significant risk, to this kind of contamination,” Mousseau said. “The more traffic there is, the most dust there is, and the dust here is contaminated.”

We’re in the age of the overtourist. You can avoid being one of them.

But Mousseau’s worries, and the anxieties of his colleagues, extend beyond health factors.

For decades, biologists, ecologists and medical researchers have been studying the mostly undisturbed expanse that is the Exclusion Zone. They’ve studied DNA mutations in plants and insects, birds and fish. As larger mammals, like moose, wolves and fox, have slowly re-occupied the surrounding forests, biologists have searched for clues about the ways short-term and long-term radiation exposure have altered their health.

Scientifically, there is no place on earth like Chernobyl. Beasley, who studies wolves there, calls it a “living laboratory." An influx of humans — especially reckless ones — could destroy it.

"This is really the only accessible place on the planet where this kind of research can be conducted at a scale both spatial and temporal that allows for important scientific discovery,” Mousseau said. “Given increased use of radiation in technology and medicine, in going to Mars and space, we need to know more about radiation and its effects on biology and organisms.”

“And Chernobyl provides a unique laboratory to do this kind of research,” he said.

Tourism’s negative footprint in the Exclusion Zone is not theoretical, either.

They are leaving behind trash, rummaging through abandoned homes and buildings and, in Mousseau’s experience, stealing his research equipment. Cameras he has hidden in the depths of the most radioactive parts of the zone to capture the wildlife he studies have been vandalized or gone missing, he said.

Aborigines say Uluru is sacred. Tourists rushing to beat a hiking ban are trashing it.

“It’s something that absolutely astounds me,” he said.

Theoretically, more government oversight at Chernobyl could help curb this kind of interference, especially if a financial investment in the zone will help preserve the ghost town there and bring in more guards and checkpoints to patrol who comes and goes.

None of that will prevent tourists from disturbing Chernobyl’s spirit.

“I think it is important to not lose sight of the fact that Chernobyl represents an area of tremendous human suffering,” Beasley said, “as hundreds of thousands of people were forever displaced from their homes or otherwise impacted by the accident.”

Maui ravaged by brush fire, prompting evacuations — and help from Oprah Winfrey

Violent turbulence on an Air Canada flight sends 30 people to the hospital after emergency landing

chernobyl tourism statistics

Thrifty Nomads

  • Disclosures

Thrifty Nomads

How to Visit Chernobyl: The Ultimate Guide (Updated 2021)

chernobyl tourism statistics

A n abandoned kindergarten room strewn with toys. The hollows of an amusement park that was never even used. An eerily vacant high school with its desks still draped in school work. These are the remnants of Chernobyl – a town blasted with 400 times the radiation of the bomb of Hiroshima, over thirty years ago. Today, it lures curious tourists in the tens of thousands. But why ?

Kindergarten - Chernobyl town

When my husband and I were planning out our itinerary for Eastern Europe a few years back, we decided to include Kiev, Ukraine, purely so that we could visit Chernobyl. Dark tourism intrigued us, and we were keen to learn more about this abandoned place and the disaster story behind it.

For those of you who aren’t very familiar with Chernobyl, here’s the basic story:

Chernobyl was a nuclear power plant located in the USSR (now Ukraine) which had a steam explosion in April of 1986. The nuclear radiation released in the days after the accident was truly catastrophic. The nearby town of Prypyat, which was home of many of the power plant workers, was evacuated the day after the explosion and the 50,000 residents were never to return to their homes.

Nuclear Reactor no. 4 (the site of the explosion) was covered with a temporary sarcophagus to confine the radiation in the weeks after the explosion, and a new sarcophagus, which has been designed to confine the radiation for another 100 years, was built by the EU and placed on site in October 2017.

chernobyl tourism statistics

We chose to see Chernobyl on a 1-day, small group tour which departed Kiev at 8:00 AM and returned around 6:00 PM. We had an English speaking guide, and a driver who transported us via minivan. On the way, a documentary was played to give us a deeper insight into the disaster and prepare us for what we were about to see. Even though I had expected to visit a mostly abandoned and derelict place, the reality was shocking. There were a handful of stops on the tour, including a small town with empty houses being swallowed back up by the forest, an abandoned kindergarten in the Chernobyl township with books and learning materials still scattered about on the desks, and an amusement park in Prypyat that was sadly never used as the town was evacuated before it could open. These confronting scenes are something that I will never forget.

Abandoned gym, Pripyat

  • 1 Chernobyl: An Overview
  • 2 Why do tourists visit Chernobyl?
  • 3 Is it safe to visit Chernobyl?
  • 4 Can you visit Chernobyl without a guide?
  • 5 How much does a Chernobyl tour cost?
  • 6 Getting there
  • 7 Where to stay
  • 8 1. Choose the best Chernobyl tour type
  • 9 2. Choose a tour company
  • 10 3. Be prepared for your Chernobyl visit
  • 11 The Thrifty Gist

Chernobyl: An Overview

Chernobyl is located about 100 km (62 mi) north of the city of Kiev, Ukraine. It takes around 2 hours to drive to Chernobyl from Kiev.

The exclusion zone is an area of 2,600 km 2 (1,000 sq mi) around the nuclear power plant. This area is considered hazardous and is off-limits to the general public. There are multiple checkpoints that you have to pass through inside the exclusion zone. The area inside the checkpoint closest to the nuclear reactor has the most dangerous levels of radiation.

When tourists talk about visiting Chernobyl, we’re generally referring to the power plant itself, but the exclusion zone actually includes a few towns and a large forested area. Tours to Chernobyl will stop by many different places of interest within the exclusion zone.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Why do tourists visit Chernobyl?

Chernobyl has many appeals for tourists. For me, it was the decay. I was intrigued to explore a place that has been completely abandoned by humans for nearly 30 years. I wanted to find out what an apocalyptic world might look like.

My husband’s appeal was the modern history aspect – he wanted to see a place that is frozen in time from the soviet era. Walking through remnants from a culture that no longer exists is a fascinating thing to experience.

Others might be interested in the disaster itself, or maybe learn more about the dangers of nuclear power and the effect it can have on the environment if something goes wrong, like it did at Chernobyl. This is perhaps the only place in the world that you can see this first-hand.

Pripyat abandoned apartment

Is it safe to visit Chernobyl?

I was asked this question by many people after my visit to Chernobyl. It’s a valid concern.

Radiation sticks around for a very long time, and the exclusion zone is not expected to be safe for humans to live in for the next 20,000 years. However, radioactivity can be considered mostly harmless in small doses (like when you get an x-ray, or even take a long-haul flight), and the day tours into the exclusion zone mean that you’re only exposed to low levels of radiation for just a few hours.

There are around 400 people that actually live inside the exclusion zone, and another several thousand that work in and around the power plant, decommissioning the retired reactors and constructing the new sarcophagus. They manage the radiation exposure by limiting their time in the most hazardous areas, and are also required to take longer breaks away from the site so that their bodies have time to recover.

On the way out of the exclusion zone, everyone is required to go through an old soviet radiation control checkpoint. The device required each person to place their hands on either side while it checks your radiation levels.

Regardless of the trip you take, it's always worth getting travel insurance in case of an emergency. We use World Nomads because you can sign up or extend your trip any time (even if you've already left your home country), over 150+ adventure activities are covered (i.e. less fine print and loopholes), and most of all, there are plenty of successful claim stories online – so it actually works! For more info, and our story of when insurance saved us $2,000 at a foreign hospital, check out our travel insurance guide here .

Chernobyl radiation checkpoint

Can you visit Chernobyl without a guide?

Tourist entry into the exclusion zone is only permitted with a licenced guide. There are many areas inside the exclusion zone that are still considered very dangerous, and a guide will have the expertise to keep you safe at all times.

How much does a Chernobyl tour cost?

Tours from Kiev cost between $100-$500 USD per person, depending on the type of tour that you choose. The day tour that I booked starts at $105 USD each, and it's worth every cent. You can browse a variety of tours along with prices, reviews, and booking with immediate confirmation on GetYourGuide and Viator .

Getting there

Flying into Boryspil International Airport (KBP) is the easiest way to get to Kiev, with direct flights from many major cities in Europe including Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, London, Prague, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Warsaw. If you are already in Ukraine, there are intercity trains that will take you from Lviv to Kiev. Budget airlines are plentiful in Eastern Europe. The easiest way to find cheap flights is to search Skyscanner and select “Entire Month” to visualize prices across a one month period.

It's also worth signing up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card . You'll get a 60,000 point bonus just by spending $4,000 in the first 3 months on your everyday purchases in the first 3 months. That's worth $750  when redeemed through Chase Ultimate Rewards, saving you a significant amount on your flight. Alternatively, you can transfer the points directly to a number of other frequent flyer programs if you are already collecting points. The card also has no international transaction fees (where most cards charge 2-3%), making this card cheaper to use overseas than any ATM or currency exchange booth.

Chase Sapphire Preferred Card

Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card

  • 60,000 reward points (worth $750 ) after meeting the minimum spend of $4,000 in the first 3 months
  • $50 annual Ultimate Rewards Hotel Credit, 5x points for purchases on Chase Ultimate Rewards, 3x points on dining, select streaming services and online groceries, and 2x points on all other travel purchases.
  • Points are worth 25% more on airfare, hotels, car rentals, and cruises when booking through Chase Ultimate Rewards (e.g. 60,000 points worth $750 toward travel)
  • Includes trip cancellation/interruption insurance, auto rental collision damage waiver, lost luggage insurance and more.
  • Can transfer your reward points to leading airline and hotel loyalty programs
  • No foreign transaction fees
  • Annual fee: $95

Downtown Kiev Ukraine

Where to stay

There are plenty of central accommodations to choose from in Kiev. Being in Eastern Europe, hotels and AirBNBs are surprisingly affordable. When you book your Chernobyl tour, check the confirmation to find your meeting point. My tour departed from Maidan Square, so I booked us a room in a hostel nearby. Many tours will depart from Kiev Central Railway Station, so a hotel closer to the station may be a better choice. Some tours (especially the private ones) offer hotel pickup.

1. Choose the best Chernobyl tour type

When booking a visit to Chernobyl, there are a few different tour types to choose from:

1-day Tours

The 1-day tours generally last from 10-12 hours, of which 4 are spent driving to and from the Chernobyl site from Kiev. The 1-day tour was packed with activities, however, I didn’t feel as though it was overly rushed or that anything was skipped over.

Chernobyl Day Tour

From Kiev: 1-Day Group Tour to Chernobyl ($100 USD)

Chernobyl Day Tour

Chernobyl Tour from Kiev ($105 USD)

Chernobyl Day Tour

Full-Day Tour of Chernobyl and Prypiat from Kiev ($114 USD)

2-day or 3-day tours.

For anyone wanting to experience the exclusion zone at a slower pace, there are 2-day, 3-day, or even longer tours available. I personally think that 2 days would be enough time to see the area.

Chernobyl 2 Day Tour

From Kiev: 2-Day Group Tour to Chernobyl ($251 USD)

Chernobyl 2 Day Tour

The Ultimate 2-Day Chernobyl Tour from Kiev ($321 USD)

Chernobyl 3 Day Tour

3-Day Extended Tour to Chernobyl and Prypiat Town from Kyiv ($429 USD)

Private tours.

Many people are interested in visiting Chernobyl for the photography aspect, and in this case, I think a private tour would be the best option as you can explore the area at your own pace. This would allow you ample time to set up shots and get great photos.

Chernobyl Private Tour

From Kiev: Private Tour of Chernobyl ($78 USD)

Chernobyl Private Day Tour with Lunch

From Kiev: Chernobyl & Pripyat Private Day Tour with Lunch ($130 USD)

Chernobyl Private Tour

Chernobyl Private Tour from Kiev ($105 USD)

Abandoned swimming pool, Pripyat

2. Choose a tour company

When I was choosing a tour company, I used online reviews to make a decision. SoloEast Travel was one of the highest rated companies on TripAdvisor, and while they weren’t necessarily the cheapest, the price was reasonable. They were an excellent choice.

Things to look for when choosing a tour:

  • Group size: Small group tours are definitely best for the Chernobyl experience. We had 10-12 people on our tour, which was perfect.
  • Inclusions/Exclusions: Hotel pickup, meals, entrance fees, taxes, and geiger-counter rental may or may not be included in the price of some tours.
  • Flexibility: 1-day tours are really great value, but if you want more time at each place or more options for photography, then consider booking a slower-paced tour for more flexibility.

3. Be prepared for your Chernobyl visit

Tours to Chernobyl can be booked year-round. We visited in late November, which was extra special as there was a thick layer of snow which gave the place an eerie vibe. It was also a quiet time to visit – we only ran into one other tour group on our day trip, but for the most part we were the only people in sight.

Many people will prefer to visit Chernobyl in the warmer months. The trees in the area are apparently beautiful in fall/autumn, so this might be a great time to go.

What to bring:

  • Comfortable, closed walking shoes.
  • A rain jacket in case of bad weather.
  • Sunscreen and a hat.
  • A camera. You can use a smartphone for photos, but if you have a mirrorless camera or DSLR, even better! The photos you get around Chernobyl will be mind-blowing.
  • A geiger-counter to measure radiation levels. We rented one from our tour company, which cost an extra $10 but it was so worth it.

For winter tours:

  • Quality winter jacket/parka. You’ll spend a lot of time outside in the cold.
  • Scarf, beanie, and gloves to stay warm.
  • Waterproof shoes suitable for walking through snow.

chernobyl tourism statistics

The Thrifty Gist

  • Chernobyl is located about 2 hours drive north of Kiev, Ukraine.
  • The exclusion zone has a range of radiation levels, but is safe to visit on a guided tour. It's always a good idea to have travel insurance regardless, and we use World Nomads .
  • You must book a tour to visit Chernobyl. 1-day, 2-day, or longer tours are available from Kiev. We took this tour , but there are plenty more to choose from with reviews on GetYourGuide and Viator .
  • You can find cheap flights by searching by “entire month” on Skyscanner . You can also get the Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card and hit the minimum spend to receive 60,000 points worth $750 , saving you a ton on your flight.

Thrifty Nomads has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Thrifty Nomads and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions expressed here are author's alone. Responses are not provided or commissioned by the bank advertiser. Responses have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.

Disclosures Many of the listings that appear on this website are from companies which we receive compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). The site does not review or include all companies or all available products. Thrifty Nomads has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Thrifty Nomads and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

How to visit Chernobyl in a responsible way

By Joan Torres 7 Comments Last updated on December 28, 2023

Chernobyl visit

On April 24th, 1986, reactor 4 from Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant suffered a massive, destructive explosion, releasing tonnes of radioactive material into the sky, which spread across Europe and even to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was an unprecedented accident caused by human negligence, which took the lives of tens of thousands of people, caused hundreds of thousands to be evacuated, plus all the social, economic and natural repercussions, whose consequences are still being suffered today.

I won’t go into technical details, but you can read all   the causes and consequences of the disaster here

As a result of the disaster, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was created, a 30km² territory that surrounds the nuclear plant, from where all the people were evacuated and access to which was completely restricted until 2009, when the Ukrainian Government decided to open it to the public.

Since then, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has attracted a few intrepid travelers interested in learning and seeing with their own eyes the effects of the worst nuclear disaster in our history.

However, things have changed.

At the beginning of 2019, after the successful TV Show broadcast by HBO, Chernobyl was, once again, something to talk about and, in very little time, just a few months, Chernobyl visitors increased by 50% , and statistics say that they will keep increasing in the coming years.

I personally believe that this increase in popularity isn’t doing any good to the Chernobyl site, as the exclusion zone is already attracting a type of tourist typically found in mass tourism destinations, characterized for being insensitive, irresponsible and lacking empathy and consciousness about the consequences of one of the worst human catastrophes.

The truth is that, after my visit, seeing what Chernobyl has become was pretty shocking and, in this article, I want to show you how to visit Chernobyl in a responsible and sensitive way . 

Remember that, for all the practical information, don’t forget to read my Ukraine travel tips

visiting Chernobyl

In this travel guide to visit Chernobyl, you will find:

Table of Contents

  • Chernobyl and mass tourism
  • My experience
  • Tips on how to visit responsibly

Practical information for visiting Chernobyl

  • Can you go independently?
  • Tour companies
  • More Information

Travel insurance for Ukraine I recommend IATI Insurance : COVID-19 coverage + 5% discount Get your discount when buying through this link

Visiting Chernobyl and the problem with mass tourism

Something I have learnt during my travels is that, inevitably, mass tourism destinations attract irresponsible travelers, ranging from the typical tourist that rides elephants to the one who doesn’t give a damn f*** about the repercussions of mass tourism on the local culture.

The irresponsible tourist who travels to Chernobyl doesn’t go because they want to learn and empathize with the victims, but they travel for pure morbidity and for showing off on Instagram that they went to a radioactive zone.

Anyone with common sense can confirm this awful situation.

If you are interested in traveling to Chernobyl, you may also want to read about my experience visiting the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan

Chernobyl tourism

However, it is important to mention that the normalization of the disaster doesn’t only happen because of tourists’ behavior. 

Actually, I strongly believe that those really responsible for such normalization are most Chernobyl tour companies, which have done nothing but sensationalize Chernobyl for their own benefit, exclusively focusing on selling you the concept of how awesome visiting a radioactive zone can be .

can you visit Chernobyl

My experience visiting Chernobyl

I visited Chernobyl on a weekday during the offseason, in mid-October, and I literally freaked out at the number of tourists I saw.

We came across 10 or 15 other groups at least.

That’s on the one hand, which wasn’t a big deal anyway. 

But, on the other hand, what really surprised me was the way some of the tour guides would tell us about Chernobyl’s disaster, and that was in a very superficial and even impertinent way.

Our guide’s explanations – who, by the way, was a young lady from Kyiv who had nothing to do with the catastrophe  – exclusively focused on the sick and sensationalist part of the disaster, and barely mentioned anything about all the people who suffered the accident directly, either the evacuated families or all the people who practically gave their lives working on cleaning up the contaminated zones.

Basically, she didn’t show any sort of sensitivity about the place.

chernobyl tourism statistics

But there’s more.

I remember having a small argument with her when I wanted to tell her about a relevant book I had read recently: Voices from Chernobyl .

She told me that she had not read it, which was kind of strange, as she was a professional tour guide; but what surprised me was her response:

This book is very sensationalist.

Apart from the fact that she had not even read it, her comment made no sense at all, as the book’s author was a Belarusian lady who won the Nobel Prize and her work was a compilation of testimonies of those who lived through the disaster in the first person. 

The book was exactly the total opposite of sensationalist, so my answer to her ignorance was:

With all due respect, the only sensationalist thing here are the tours the different Chernobyl companies sell. 

On top of this, if we consider the behavior of some of the people from the group, who couldn’t stop making jokes, selfies and taking ridiculous poses in front of abandoned places, what do you want me to say…

Chernobyl has become a disgustingly sensationalist place.

Read: Visiting a Syrian refugee camp in Iraq

can you visit Chernobyl today

Tips on how to visit Chernobyl in a responsible way

Here are my responsible traveler tips:

In order to empathize with the place, read a good book about Chernobyl

And I recommend Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize of Literature for writing precisely this book and a few more of the same genre.

Voices from Chernobyl is a compilation of testimonies directly related to the disaster, from people who were evacuated to those who refused to leave, soldiers who helped with both the evacuation and clean up, firemen, liquidators, scientists and basically, the whole Chernobyl world.

A compilation of absolutely sobering and hair-raising stories whose only achievement is to put you in their skin in a very f***ed up way.

I promise you that, after reading this book, you will see Chernobyl with very different eyes.

chernobyl tourism statistics

Choose the right tour company

To be very honest with you, I think I kind of overreacted before.

Not all companies sell sensationalist tours.

A few of them are guided by very professional guides who were somehow related to the disaster.

For example, some guides are old residents of the exclusion zone, while others participated in the cleanup.

Those guides really know what Chernobyl is about and, besides telling you the most empirical and tangible facts about the accident, they will also tell you the stories they lived and experienced.

And, how to find the best company?

Something to be aware of is that the best tour company isn’t the one with the best reviews on Tripadvisor.

In fact, the one I chose had very positive reviews, for the simple reason that the guide was a nice lady and had good knowledge about the facts, but she lacked empathy and sensitivity, two qualities which, in my opinion, each and every guide should have.

Use your common sense when looking for those reviews that talk about the person’s attitude and behavior.

Many who visit Chernobyl and Ukraine then head to Moldova to visit the unrecognized country of Transnistria

Duga radar Chernobyl

Consider booking a 2-day tour

Typically, the tour companies offer two different tours: 1-day or 2-day tour.

The 1-day tour, the one which 95% of tourists choose, takes you to those famous places which today flood all over Instagram feeds: the Ferris-wheel, Duga radar, reactor 4, etc.

In the 2-day tour, however, they will take to visit locals living in the exclusion zone, some of them being re-settlers (those who came back after X years), while others are locals who refused to leave. 

Meeting those locals can be a good chance to learn and empathize even more.

Read my guide to visit Kyiv in 3 days

Chernobyl travel

Don’t take selfies, don’t make jokes, be respectful

Basically, behave like a normal person.

The Chernobyl disaster took the lives away of thousands of people, so the least you can do is paying your respects.

Also, remember to pay your respects to Belarus

Chernobyl Nuclear Plant is located in today’s Ukraine but not many people know that about 70% of the radioactive fallout  landed in Belarus, contaminating one-fourth of the country. Crazy. 

The exclusion zone of Belarus is actually bigger and up to 2,000 towns were totally evacuated.

Whereas the nuclear disaster is the worst thing that has ever happened to Ukraine and Ukrainians, remember that Belarussians suffered even more and, for some reason, the world tends to forget that.

I just want you to be aware of that and, if you want to be a real responsible traveler, you should visit the exclusion on Belarus side, where mass tourism hasn’t arrived yet.

Read my travel guide to Belarus

is it safe to visit Chernobyl

Here’s what you need to know to prepare for traveling to Chernobyl.

Where is it?

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is 150km north of Kiev and less than 20km from the border with Belarus.

Chernobyl is a small town but the power plant, despite being named after Chernobyl, is in a city called Pripyat, 20km north of Chernobyl.

Today, Pripyat is a ghost city but Chernobyl is partially inhabited, mainly by workers from the exclusion zone, who do 2-week shifts.

Chernobyl town

Is it safe to visit Chernobyl?

Is Chernobyl safe to visit? Before analyzing Chernobyl’s dangers, let me clarify something. 

Before my visit, I had read a few travel blogs whose authors claimed that they felt very safe in Chernobyl .

Well, I am sorry to say that this is one of the stupidest things you can ever say because radiation is something invisible, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it and you can’t hear it.

Those who had to be evacuated also felt very safe and, in fact, that was one of the greatest problems, but then, after X months, all of them woke up with no hair and tumors in their body.

Today, Chernobyl isn’t a dangerous place, not because one feels safe, but because professional physicists have confirmed that the levels of radioactivity have decreased enough, so it doesn’t affect humans for short exposure.

is Chernobyl safe to visit

How does radiation work?

Obviously, I am no physicist and I don’t know if I should write about it but, as a traveler, I wanted to know a little bit about radiation and this is what I learnt.

When you get to the exclusion zone, during the first few kilometers, the dosimeters mark 0.15 microsieverts (Sv) per hour, which is pretty much the same level of radiation you get in any major city around the world, from Barcelona to Kiev . 

Chernobyl exclusion zone

As you continue getting closer to the nuclear plant and reach Pripyat, the radiation levels increase to 1-2Sv per hour, which is 10 to 20 times the normal levels but apparently, it is less than having an x-ray taken or even flying in a plane.

However, in some areas we passed by, especially the Red Forest, the dosimeters reached 40Sv per hour, but we passed it quickly in the bus, so the total exposure was less than a few seconds. 

This type of radiation is called gamma rays but, in Chernobyl, there is an additional type of radiation named beta particles β , a kind of radioactive dust which – theoretically – unless you start digging something up from the ground, you shouldn’t be contaminated by it.

These tiny particles can’t be detected by the dosimeters they lend you but, once you leave the exclusion zone, they scan your body to check whether you were contaminated or not. 

In this article, you will find a very insightful radiation comparison

Chernobyl visit safe

How much does it cost to travel to Chernobyl?

The 1-day tour costs around 90-100€, whereas the 2-day tour costs 270€.

What’s included?

  • 1-day tour: round trip transportation from Kiev to the exclusion zone, the guide and lunch.
  • 2-day tour: round trip transportation from Kiev to the exclusion zone, the guide, all meals and 1 night in the hotel of the exclusion zone.

By the way, the dosimeters cost an additional 200UAH, around 7.50€.

Can you visit Chernobyl without a guide?

Yes, you can, but not legally.

In fact, there are a few companies (and you can find them on Google) that offer clandestine 3-day walking tours, staying and camping inside buildings from the exclusion zone.

Can you recommend me a tour company?

I can’t, sorry.

I don’t really want to mention the one I went with and I can’t recommend a company I haven’t tried.

The only thing I can tell you is that you should do proper research and book well in advance. 

By the way, don’t forget your passport and, if you want to fly a drone, let the company know because you will need to get a specific permit.

Conclusion: is it ethical to visit Chernobyl?

I am going to say the exact same I said after receiving loads of negative feedback when I came back from my trip to Syria .

If you travel with the sole objective of learning, gaining knowledge and you are respectful to the locals, in my most humble opinion, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in paying a visit to places like Chernobyl, Syria or the Aral Sea .

In fact, I think that it would something positive, as you would be able to talk about the situation of the place based on your own experience and not on what the media says.

More information for visiting Chernobyl

📢 In my Travel Resources Page you can find the list of all the sites and services I use to book hotels, tours, travel insurance and more.

Don’t forget to check our travel guide to Ukraine .

As well as all our Ukraine articles:

  • Kiev Travel Guide
  • Lviv Travel Guide
  • Ukraine Itinerary

visit Chernobyl

Thank you so much for this educational article. I will make it my purpose to fly there in the next 20 months, but before I do I will read (buying it as we speak) The Voices from Chernobyl. The world would be a better place if we have more people with a basic level of humanity (such yourself). Thank you again!!

Maria Chadwick

Thanks to you for your kind words 🙂 And you made a great choice buying the book, you will love it!

I went to Chernobyl this time last year and found it very educational indeed and if anything, a few things are put there by the Ukrainians FOR the tourists, so I don’t feel anyone singularly is at fault. You are only allowed to stay in the exclusion zone for 48 hours anyway before being moved out and I went through 6 full body radiation machines, and we had a Geiger counter with us the entire time so we’re perfectly safe, although you do have to sign a waiver to go into the heavily guarded areas which are monitored by the military, such as the fascinating Duga disused radar defence area. The country needs the outside world to visit and not only meet the amazing Ukrainian population, find out their personal experiences and visit places such as the Chernobyl museum, but learn about their Soviet past and learn from the people who are there, and also visit a truely amazing country in its own right, live among the people and be friends with them. Know that there are rules for going to places like this and if there were any dangers to visiting, the country would be on the FCO’s list of no go areas in the world. I have been lucky enough to visit a few countries on this list which have been amazing experiences and would urge anyone to explore the world around them to learn about life and not just bake on a beach for a week. The disaster was a truely tragic event and we need to learn from it but fundamentally understand it and make the future a better place for the next generations to come. And sometimes that means visiting these exquisite places.

Just here to help with a potential correction. 1-2Sv(Sv=sivert) is most likely missing the prefix micro(u=10^-6)(Greek letter mu, but I will use “u” due to keyboard limitations) . The threshold dose for effects such as depression of the blood cell forming process occurs after a measly 50000uSv(0.5Sv) meaning at an exposure rate of 1-2Sv/hr most would experience radiation sickness after 1hr of exposure and 5Sv will kill a large majority of those exposed to it within a months time. However if you throw the prefix micro(10^-6) the numbers start to get much more reasonable and I’m sure they would be more accurate as no Radiation Safety Physicist(such as myself) would allow anyone near an area with levels like 40Sv/hr as that would promise certain death after just minutes of exposure.

Thanks for this fantastic explanartion, Dan!

Great article to read!

Great article and a very informative read! Would never have considered traveling to chernobyl if I haven’t checked this out. At least I have some ideas now on what to expect if ever I want to visit here. Thank you!

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  Notify me when new comments are added.

Join our Expeditions

From Syria to Iraq in Pakistan, Against the Compass is finally running expeditions to the most epic and off-the-beaten-track countries.

We have scheduled expeditions for every month of the year.

Latest posts

  • Is Iraq safe to visit in 2024?
  • Things to do in Iraq in a 10-day itinerary
  • How to travel to Mosul in 2024
  • A guide to traveling in Iraq in 2024
  • How to travel to Haiti (2024)

IMAGES

  1. Chernobyl Zone visitors statistics

    chernobyl tourism statistics

  2. Chernobyl Tours attracted 100 000 tourists due to Chernobyl HBO Series

    chernobyl tourism statistics

  3. Number of Chernobyl Exclusion Zone visitors 2021

    chernobyl tourism statistics

  4. (PDF) THE CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION ZONE AS A TOURIST ATTRACTION. REFLECTIONS

    chernobyl tourism statistics

  5. Chernobyl Visit

    chernobyl tourism statistics

  6. A Complete Travel Guide on How to Visit Chernobyl, Ukraine

    chernobyl tourism statistics

VIDEO

  1. Tourism up at Chernobyl

  2. Into The Zone

  3. Chernobyl's $3 Billion radioactive mega tomb

  4. Chernobyl: The Disaster that Changed the World Forever

  5. Why Chernobyl Exploded

  6. Chernobyl anniversary: from disaster to tourist destination, what's happened?

COMMENTS

  1. Number of Chernobyl Exclusion Zone visitors 2021

    Nearly 73.1 thousand tourists visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine in 2021. In the previous year, the visitor count sharply fell due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The tourist flow peaked at ...

  2. Why Would Anyone Want to Visit Chernobyl?

    The video was intended as a primer, so that by the time we got to the site of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history, everyone would be up to speed on the basic facts: how in the early ...

  3. Where Mass Tourism Overrides Memorialization, Chernobyl Is Far from a

    In the case of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, this "Soviet time capsule" is observed and interacted with by a growing number of tourists every year. Up until 2011, numerous tour companies were ...

  4. A record number of people are visiting Chernobyl and Ukraine's

    Chernobyl could become a World Heritage site by 2023 Credit: Michal Lis on Unsplash April 26, 2021 will mark the 35th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster in history, the meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. ... Dark tourism boom For the dark tourist - defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with ...

  5. Dark tourism takes to the sky above Chernobyl

    Dark tourism takes to the sky above Chernobyl. By Pavlo Fedykovych, CNN. 5 minute read. Updated 9:19 AM EDT, Wed April 21, 2021. Link Copied! Dark decline: Despite this, the pandemic has put its ...

  6. Chernobyl to become official tourist attraction, Ukraine says

    Chernobyl has become one of the most popular examples of the phenomenon known as dark tourism - a term for visiting sites associated with death and suffering, such as Nazi concentration camps in ...

  7. 35 years since its nuclear disaster, Chernobyl prepares for tourist

    Ukraine's authorities hope that Chernobyl can be a monument not just to human error, but the ability to move on. In the 35 years since the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the nearby main ...

  8. The Nuclear Tourist

    In 2011, Chernobyl, site of the world's worst catastrophe at a nuclear power plant, was officially declared a tourist attraction. Nuclear tourism. Coming around the time of the Fukushima ...

  9. From nuclear disaster to Chernobyl's booming tourism

    By Blake Sifton. 9 Sep 2018. Three decades since a reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded in one of history's worst nuclear disasters, tourists are flocking to the site in Ukraine, drawn ...

  10. Why Chernobyl has suddenly become a hotspot for global tourists

    The site of the world's worst radiological catastrophe is unexpectedly coming back to life -- due to an American television show. Scores of tourists are visiting Chernobyl, located in northern ...

  11. Chernobyl sees a spike in visitors as pop culture influences tourism

    ET. Chernobyl, the site of a nuclear accident that left the city abandoned, is seeing a spike in visitors following the release of HBO's popular miniseries based on the events. Kiev's tourism and ...

  12. What a Tour Through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Is Really Like

    Julia Czub, a student from the UK who toured Chernobyl in May 2019 with SoloEast tour company, told Business Insider that they weren't allowed to touch trees inside the exclusion zone and couldn't ...

  13. Chernobyl and the dangerous ground of 'dark tourism'

    A new TV series has spurred travel to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine and has renewed debate over the ethics of so-called dark tourism to locations associated with death and ...

  14. Features and trends of the Chernobyl tourism development

    The author defines Chernobyl tourism as a visit to the exclusion zone, which was formed as a result of a large-scale technological disaster, i.e., an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power ...

  15. Chernobyl dreams: investigating visitors' storytelling in the Chernobyl

    Introduction. This paper seeks to continue earlier research on storytelling in dark tourism (Kužnik and Veble, 2018; Lennon, 2018; Tercia et al., 2022) through visitors' narrative engagement with a case study on the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ), which has been in the process of gradual marketisation as an international tourism destination (Banaszkiewicz et al., 2017).

  16. How the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. inspired a wave of real-world

    This regulated, streamlined new version of Chernobyl tourism is better for business, it's better for Ukraine, and it means that by the time S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 arrives, any would-be trespassers are ...

  17. Dark tourism: when tragedy meets tourism

    Grenfell Tower, which still dominates the surrounding skyline (it's due to be demolished in late 2018), had become a site for 'dark tourism', a loose label for any sort of tourism that involves visiting places that owe their notoriety to death, disaster, an atrocity or what can also loosely be termed 'difficult heritage'. It's a phenomenon that ...

  18. Chernobyl, site of nuclear disaster, now a tourist zone

    Empty swimming pool —. Three decades after the nuclear disaster there, guided tours take increasing numbers of tourists deep into Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone. Pripyat, the town built near the ...

  19. Chernobyl tourism: This is how to visit the site safely, scientists say

    The tourists first started flocking to Chernobyl nearly 10 years ago, when fans of the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wanted to see firsthand the nuclear wasteland they'd visited in virtual reality ...

  20. Chernobyl disaster

    Learn about the Chernobyl disaster and its wide-ranging repercussions in this video. The disaster occurred on April 25-26, 1986, when technicians at reactor Unit 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. Workers shut down the reactor's power-regulating system and its emergency safety systems, and they withdrew most of the control rods from ...

  21. How to Visit Chernobyl: The Ultimate Guide (Updated 2021)

    Chernobyl: An Overview. Chernobyl is located about 100 km (62 mi) north of the city of Kiev, Ukraine. It takes around 2 hours to drive to Chernobyl from Kiev. The exclusion zone is an area of 2,600 km2 (1,000 sq mi) around the nuclear power plant. This area is considered hazardous and is off-limits to the general public.

  22. Chernobyl control room now open to visitors

    CNN —. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has seen a huge increase in visitor numbers in recent years as part of a growing global interest in dark tourism . And now, intrepid travelers be able to ...

  23. How to visit Chernobyl in a responsible way

    1-day tour: round trip transportation from Kiev to the exclusion zone, the guide and lunch. 2-day tour: round trip transportation from Kiev to the exclusion zone, the guide, all meals and 1 night in the hotel of the exclusion zone. By the way, the dosimeters cost an additional 200UAH, around 7.50€.