How many people live in this village?
Just one.
Obviously, out here, you're quite cut off from the outside world,
so what do you know about the current situation in the world with the ——?
She said she doesn't know anything about it.
The most important to her now is her chicken.
She must plant potato, this is what initial issue for her.
She doesn't think about —— at all.
Do you watch the news, or... Do you have a television or anything?
No connection to the outside world? Telephone?
No.
In this video, we will be entering the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
But firstly, let's go back thirty-five years.
There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union,
and the Soviets have admitted that it happened.
An official announcement from the council of ministers
there has been an accident at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.
The Soviets may have been fairly quick to acknowledge the accident
because evidence in the form of mild nuclear radiation
had already reached beyond the Soviet borders to Scandinavia.
The civilian plant in question is in Ukraine.
It's near the city of Kiev, population of 2.5 million.
And about a thousand miles from Scandinavia,
meaning that whatever did occur there
a radioactive cloud headed north across Poland today and into Denmark
where radiation levels were five times normal and in Sweden illegally high.
On April 26, 1986, at approximately 01:23 in the morning,
a late-night safety test that went horribly wrong
in reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
caused catastrophic consequences.
This is my second time to Chernobyl, but in this video series,
we will be going deeper into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
exploring Pripyat, the abandoned city that used to inhabit fifty thousand people,
and even out to a remote village
that used to have a population of six hundred people
but now has a population of only one.
Behind a wall of military and police checkpoints.
To access the exclusion zone, it's almost like accessing another country.
Multiple checkpoints passports, and essentially visas are checked.
Hospitals, kindergartens, high schools, morgues, churches,
all abandoned and all left as they were on that fateful day.
And remember, the people of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
only had a few hours to evacuate,
and they were told that they would be returning in a few day's time,
but of course, they never returned.
They were told to only bring the bare essentials.
Many of their belongings are sitting exactly
where they were left thirty-five years ago.
So, here we are.
This is actually the very start of the Chernobyl town,
not Pripyat, not the city with 50.000,
the smaller city which used to have a population
of about thirteen thousand, fourteen thousand.
You can see the Chernobyl sign behind me here
and the hammer and sickle up there.
Today we're gonna do something a bit different.
We're going to be going to a supermarket,
we're gonna pick up a few supplies
and then we're going to go out to the resettlers of Chernobyl people
that were originally evacuated but came back to live.
A lot of them nowadays sadly are dying because of old age.
We're going to go and visit a lady that lives in an abandoned village.
Meet her, hear her story and see her living conditions.
I think it's going to be absolutely fascinating.
- Thank you very much. - Thank you.
- A can of meat. - In a BMW bag.
Oh yeah, this is very useful.
So, we've come to an abandoned village here.
You could see a clip there.
We had to get our passports checked to get into this area completely,
and so there's many houses just like this one we drove past.
At least a dozen that I saw, but there's many more on the trees.
This one's quite out in the open, so it's a good example.
So, you just imagine as many of these villages
that were just completely evacuated.
But like you're gonna see soon,
we're going to go and meet somebody who returned.
But this one was never returned to.
You can see the roof is collapsing here.
It's really a quite precarious situation.
And remember that these people were told
that they were going to return in four days but that never happened,
so a lot of the stuff, again, was left just like that.
Barci, His name is Barci. Dog's name I mean.
Dunia. Her name is Dunia.
It's an interview.
How many people live in this village?
So, just one, just me.
I'm a big boss of this village.
Do you like living in the village on your own?
I don't have anyone to talk to. I'm alone like a wolf.
My only friends are the cat and the dog.
No children?
No children, yeah.
This is where she cooks.
This is milk?
- Water. - Water.
Salt.
What do you mainly eat?
Potatoes, borscht.
So, soup, potatoes, bread.
Meat and the pork rind.
And what's this down here?
For chicken.
What's the heating system in here?
Because I can imagine it gets quite cold.
So, she has two heating systems, one just for heating in that room.
She can put wood in here,
and this one for heating and cooking as well,
but sometimes too cold she used two heatings.
Sometimes when it's really cold, she climbs up,
up here, and sleeps on top of the oven.
A visitor from Poland.
We just discussed about the day.
- She's one day ahead. - Yeah.
She doesn't trust me.
She thinks I'm making a joke about the day.
Seriously?
She said I never got mistaken to date.
What is that? Oh, pig fat.
Pork fat.
She has a constant electricity supply but sometimes no electricity
because fallen trees cut the wires.
It takes time to fix power lines.
I asked her if she sleeps here, there, or there.
She said usually here.
Usually, this is her main bed.
When the Chernobyl explosion happened, you had to leave this village?
Everyone was kicked out from here.
Can you walk me through when you were here at your house,
and then people showed up and said you've got to go?
Lots of buses came to this village, and the people had to jump in.
Can you tell me how you were feeling?
Were you scared, or how did you feel at the time?
She was not scared, she was worried about her property.
It's normal because they had to leave
cats, dogs, chicken and property, private house.
And how long were you away before you decided to come back
or before you were allowed to come back?
In around one year, she returned.
Was it a hard process to be allowed to come back, or were that easy?
She was even invited to come back.
Because this place needed workers and as she was over 45 years old
she got permission to come back because only retired could come back
or only those who are over 45 years old
those who are not going to have babies anymore.
Because of the radiation?
Yes, yes, you know radiation can harm embryos.
It's a risk of mutation.
Some bread here.
This bread, I guess dry is bread for chicken.
Fruit trees, apple trees, her chicken.
Is it nice to see people like when we show up, was a nice surprise?
It's nice to see them. I can talk to them.
Sometimes they bring some food.
Sometimes she don't see visitors for months,
it's not often, that's quite rare.
Obviously, out here, you're quite cut off from the outside world,
so what do you know about the current situation in the world with the ——?
She just heard that there's some —— in the world, just heard.
She doesn't know anything about it, the most important to her now,
is her chicken, her garden, she's going to go next week to a fire station
ask to provide her with the structure to plow the ground
because she must plant potato, this is what initial issue for her.
She doesn't think about the current situation about —— at all.
Do you watch the news, or... Do you have a television or anything?
She has a broken TV.
No connection to the outside world? Telephone?
No.
Thank you very much. You are welcome
She actually, she said thank you very much.
Incredible and a true honor to be able to see such a lifestyle, you know.
You know where everybody around the world,
where the —— is at the front of everybody's minds.
Up here it's not even at all anything major, you know.
The main thing that she's worried about
is her vegetables and spring is a bit late this year,
so the main worry is that she hasn't been able to get her vegetables in
and this shed here is where she makes her moonshine, homemade alcohol.
Plastic on the windows, and that's in preparation for summer
because it gets too hot inside,
but like we're just saying, spring come late this year,
so it's actually quite cold in that house, to be honest.
Really incredible lady and a really nice smile on her face.
So, here we are further into the village here,
and there's a monument to the World War II here.
A statue of a soldier with a machine gun.
We're actually extremely close to the Belarusian border,
so I think Belarus is, as the crow flies,
maybe a kilometer from here, the border,
and then the closest Belarusian village
the lady was telling us was 10 kilometers away.
This is in the same village here and nothing.
Those who died during World War II and you can see lots of same names
because families in the village they had big families.
Were they people that served
or people that were caught in the crossfire, a combination of both?
It's everybody, I guess.
This is the medical center of the village here.
Once with a population of 600 people and now a population of one.
I can tell you that truth now.
- Are you ready? - Yeah.
Take a look, turn your camera over, over there.
You see? Pripyat, from here is 30 kilometers.
Chernobyl, 10 kilometers
and Belarusian borderline to the right, 1.5 kilometers.
Is it that sensational or not?
Add this into your video.
You will get a few more million subscribers, you know.
Okay.
So, we've driven for like an hour and a half
along this pretty much a dirt track in the middle of nowhere,
across some train tracks, abandoned villages
all the way along, really rough road.
We've come for one reason all that way
and that's what I'm looking at right now.
An abandoned church, wooden church just in the middle of nowhere.
And all along the way, there's abandoned farms, grain mills.
It's the scale I think, is what stands out in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, you know.
You do have Pripyat and Chernobyl town,
but there's just endless amounts of villages.
This is really quite off the beaten path.
I just want to take a quick second out
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So thanks again to Skillshare. Let's get back to the video.
No way!
This is in such good condition.
I have never seen something abandoned in this good condition before.
Steep stairs.
Wow!
You know, because in churches you normally can't go to this kind of places,
you know, functioning churches, so it's quite...
I've always wanted to go up to these spots,
but it's quite special to be able to come up here.
This is the last remaining, one of these wooden churches in the area
because there's many forest fires around here.
We actually went past some burnt forest today earlier in the day,
and the other churches were sadly burnt down in forest fires,
but this one's remaining, luckily.
One day this will be gone.
Who knows if a fire comes through or it just deteriorates.
This is really quite out in the middle of nowhere.
It's a big journey just for this church, but you know, totally worth it.
Join us in the next video for more from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone