Sealed-off zone

The most severe contamination occurred within the so-called Exclusion Zone, a circular area around the power plant with a radius of 30 kilometers (19 miles) that has been deemed unsuitable for living.

Several villages and a whole pine forest in the zone were bulldozed and buried shortly after the disaster. Other small settlements are overgrown with trees and bushes that have made the red and white brick houses barely visible.

Prypyat, built to house Chernobyl power plant workers and their families and with a bright future ahead of it as a model Soviet 'atomgrad' town, had a pre-disaster population of 50,000.

Now it is a ghost town that greets its rare visitors with eerie silence. A shop building in the center is full of rubble and broken furniture – rem- nants of years of looting which the government could not prevent and which spread hazardous substances across the country. A portrait of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin lies on the floor, covered by a thick layer of dust. At a children's amusement park, a Ferris wheel due to be launched less than a week after the disaster is rusting away.

Prypyat's residents, mostly young families, were evacuated in a six-hour operation which began more than 36 hours after the accident. In the days that followed, as the fallout was driven by a south-east wind across neighboring Belarus, the Soviet government evacuated thousands of people from other areas under threat.

"We were evacuated on May 4," said Makar Krasovsky, 73, who lived in the Belarussian village of Pogonnoye 27 km (17 miles) from the plant.

"Children had been evacuated earlier, on May 1. Nobody knew anything. Nobody told us anything." "We were told to take with us clothes for the next three days but nothing else because everything was contaminated. They promised us the reactor would be shut down and we would return in three days," he said.

Pogonnoye is still sealed off and visits are only allowed once a year – on a day when local Orthodox Christians attend the graves of their ancestors.