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Chernobyl from the inside

 
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/spring2007.html

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Elena Filatova is a real-life hero of mine.

She explores abandoned places and has been especially admired for her observations on Chernobyl.
Having been born in Prypiat, nearby, she has returned there several times, and published this elegant, moving and very reflective illustrated essay (click pix or title) in 2004 — 18 years after the disaster.

Other subjects she explores at her website are equally taboo — places of death and incarceration, including the gulag, for example — and she is so outspoken about politics, and so independent that a reader can’t help worrying for her safety at times.


Here’s a taste (the captions are hers):


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My favourite are roads that haven’t been ridden for years.
Sometimes, I leave a log on the road to see if someone else will travel here.
When I return in a year or two, seeing my log has not been moved suggests that I still have no followers.


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Chernobyl is so easily forgotten because it was only known to ourselves.
In the first years after the accident we didn’t want to share our story with the world, now we can not share it, we hardly remember it ourselves.
All that remains of the tragic tale is a memory, weak and disfigured by time.

In the future, indifference of people will smother the few remaining embers until at last they too are extinguished.
After that Chernobyl will always remain inside knowledge of a few eminent individuals and the sole property of nature.


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Now here’s a little extra for you, Cloggo: Elena Filativa travels by motorbike and uses the nickname Kiddofspeed


She writes about her mode of travel:

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different motorbikes.
I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big kawasaki ninja, that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.
I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl “dead zone”, which is 130kms from my home.

Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.
The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.
In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago — except for an occasional blade of grass or some tree that discovered a crack to spring through.
Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again … a few centuries from now.

 

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