PHOTODOCUMENTARY EXHIBITION «DEAD CITY’S MEMORIES»

…There is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his accomplishments
because who will lead him to see what shall be after him…
Ecclesiastes, 3, 22

National Museum “Chernobyl” invites you to a virtual journey in time by the streets of Polessky atomic city. Alexander SIROTA helps you to make the journey. He is a journalist, photographer, filmmaker, member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Most of his work dedicated to Pripyat – the city of his childhood and the Chernobyl disaster. The chief editor of the Internet project Pripyat.com, Vice President of the International NGO “Center of Pripyat. Com”. He initiated the appeal to the international community and collecting signatures to provide the city of Pripyat the international status of a city museum, and a 10-km exclusion zone – status historical – ecological reserve, the largest man-made disasters monument planet.

“In April 1986, I was not yet ten years old. Cozy streets of the city, all its courtyards and alleys, the nearby forest and the river Pripyat – were places of our childhood games and “military battles” for me, a carefree boy, and my peers… That fateful Saturday – April 26 – was not exception.  I remember how my friends and I ran to the river after school to play on the beach, to build fortresses and bunkers almost to the evening…”

During this journey you make sure as in the absence of man the time changes and destroys all that man had built by hard work. There remain only memories and dreams of a young snow-white city that once was a bustling, blooming, full of great hopes…

A.Sirota , direct speech: “I’d like to believe – a person who visited this place, would not be able to live so that afterwards remained dead cities”

The exhibition is open on the second floor of the museum  June 22, 2015.

We presented archival documentary photographs of Pripyat of 1981-85, photos of Pripyat of 2001-2011 made by A.Sirota. The photo “Pripyat  Ferris  Wheel 1” by S. Vederskyi (Pripyat in Panoramas Project)  also participated in the exhibition.