Now that spring has arrived here in the southeast U.S., Chernobyl looks like a cold and forbidding place. It was a cold and forbidding place, matter of fact.
Here are a few HDR photos from last month's travel. Click them to make them
bigger. There are 35 photos posted so far to this gallery at EarthPhotos.com. One or two more go up most days.
First is the gymnasium at the Palace of Culture in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was the town built specifically to service the Chernobyl nuclear power complex. At the time it was evacuated, it held some 45,000 scientists, engineers and their families. The average age was just 26.
-----
Same building, just on the central square, along with a supermarket, government buildings, a restaurant and a hotel. The rug says "CCCP 60," to commemorate the USSR's 60th anniversary, which was a little over three years before the accident.
-----
The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv is just about all in Ukrainian, with just little laminated cards to read in English, but much of the story being told is visual, anyway. The lands between Berlin and Moscow had it tough. They were flattened from one direction by the Germans, then from the other by the Russians. This monument is in an underground walkway outside the museum.
-----
There's a restaurant atop the Legacy Ottoman Hotel, just above the Eminonu ferries, with this fine view of the Golden Horn. Arrive about 5:00, as we did, and you have the whole place to yourself.
-----
There's a warren of alleyways between the indoor part of the Grand Bazaar and the waterfront. Here, men line up for a little work. Somebody dropped off there bundles of merchandise, and these guys are carrying them who knows where.
Comments