Today is the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I was unaware of this until I heard it this morning on the radio while driving to work. Completely by coincident, a friend of mine and I were looking at pictures of the dead city of Pripyat yesterday, a city in northern Ukraine. Pripyat was evacuated back in 1986 due to high radiation levels caused by the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl. The population at the time was estimated at 45,000 people.

My friend and I were discussing photographers who take pictures of abandon objects and forgotten worlds. He had me do a search for the dead city of Pripyat. A wave of sadness came over me as he showed me the images of a place that was once home to thousands of families — now it’s nothing but a ghost town. Twenty years ago, the people of Pripyat collected what posessions they could and left their homes forever. I can’t imagine how sad that must have been.

Click on any of these images below to see the sites they came from.