After the apocalypse: Haunting photographs show the sprawling ruins of Chernobyl 27 years after nuclear disaster



Photographer Hélène Veilleux was allowed into the Zone Of Alienation surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear plant

Her pictures show the desolate area covering 1,000 square miles that was evacuated after blast in April 1986

Schools, shops, fairgrounds, swimming pools and homes - all are slowly falling into ruins as zone returns to forest




Scores of abandoned gas masks covering a shop floor, rusted carriages of a motionless big wheel, neglected wallpaper falling off the wall of an empty family home...



These haunting images offer a rare glimpse into the life that stopped still in Chernobyl and neighbouring city Pripyat 27 years ago, when a test at a nuclear power reactor went wrong.

It was the worst nuclear disaster in history, and so dangerous was the fallout that the Ukrainian government evacuated 350,000 residents, creating an Exclusion Zone where time has stood still ever since.



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Scores of abandoned gas masks cover the floor of what may have been a shop in Pripyat, a once-thriving town of 50,000 people near the Ukrainian border with Belarus

Time has stood still at this fairground ride that once echoed to children's laughter: Now rusted and blackened, it serves as a bleak memorial to long-gone families Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the exclusion zone, leaving behind homes into which they had invested time, money and love

Most people are barred from living in the zone, named the Alienation Zone, which covers an area of more than 1,000sq miles around the abandoned plant, to protect them from the effects of any lingering radiation. A few residents refused to leave, and a handful of older residents have moved back to be close to family graves, but the area is mostly uninhabited and has now reverted to forests.

Tourists may obtain day passes, and workers who are rebuilding the damaged sarcophagus are allowed in for limited hours only each month. Scientists the area will not be safe to live in for another 20,000 years.



Earlier this month, photographer Hélène Veilleux was allowed in, and spent four days photographing the irradiated ruins of the towns where hundreds of thousands of families once lived, worked and died.

These astonishing photographs document what she saw on her journey from Chernobyl to Pripyat.

The public swimming baths would once have resonated to shrieks from excited children - the now-drained pool has not been swum in for decades