Abandoned buildings — Ukraine
Abandoned buildings — Ukraine. 4 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (officially the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station, or ChNPP) is a decommissioned nuclear energy facility located in the Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, along the Pripyat River and a man-made cooling reservoir, roughly 3 kilometers southeast of the abandoned city of Pripyat and 18 kilometers northwest of Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, the site suffered the most catastrophic reactor breach in nuclear history (Level 7, the maximum on the INES scale), which destroyed Reactor Unit 4. Today, ChNPP is a specialized decommissioning site enclosed by the monumental New Safe Confinement arch structure.
The Adzhimushkay quarries
The Adzhimushkay Quarries constitute an extensive subterranean limestone quarry system (comprising the Great and Small Adzhimushkay labyrinths) located on the outskirts of Kerch near the settlement of Adzhimushkay on the Kerch Peninsula, Crimea. Having supplied coquina building stone since antiquity, these catacombs became the site of one of World War II's most harrowing subterranean sieges: from May to October 1942, surrounded Soviet rear-guard units and local civilians mounted an unrelenting 170-day defense trapped in absolute darkness, enduring lethal dehydration, structural demolitions, and continuous chemical asphyxiation assaults by the German Wehrmacht.
Chufut-Kale
A cave town on a Crimean plateau, inhabited from the sixth century and abandoned in the nineteenth. The name means Jewish fortress — the Karaites were the last to live here. Houses, cisterns, a prison and the mausoleum of the khan's daughter Canike Hanım are cut into the rock. Beside it lies the Karaite cemetery of Balta Tiymez, "the axe shall not touch" — a protected oak grove where felling was absolutely forbidden, which is why it outlived every wood around it.
Pripyat
Pripyat is an abandoned city of regional significance situated in the Vyshhorod Raion of Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine, along the banks of the Pripyat River roughly 3 kilometers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) and 16 kilometers from the border with Belarus. Founded in February 1970 as the ninth Soviet "atomgrad" (atomic company town) for power plant personnel, the municipality was completely evacuated on April 27, 1986, following the catastrophic explosion of ChNPP Reactor No. 4. Housing nearly 50,000 residents at the time of the disaster, Pripyat became the world's premier modern ghost town, serving as an open-air monument to industrial failure, a frozen time capsule of late-Soviet urban planning, and the ground zero of global urban exploration culture.