Museum to be built in Chornobyl

According to Ukrainska Pravda, the construction of a museum-park, similar to the Kyiv Pyrohiv Museum, is underway in Chornobyl. It is planned to be finished by April 26, 2011, on the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster. First, five hectares of land will be developed. “At the moment we are conducting a clean-up of the area allotted for this purpose (the city is located 17 kilometres from the plant). Nearly 20 buildings have been dismantled, mostly neglected old houses and an old department store,” the head of the Exclusion Zone Department Vasyl Zolotoverkh explained. “The park will be similar to Kyiv’s Pyrohiv. It will contain objects from each of the 94 population centres that suffered from the catastrophe. For example, a house, a tree, or a road sign. Of course, we won’t manage to build everything in a year, but at least we will prepare the ground,” he reported. Chornobyl’s samosels, self-settlers or squatters, (there are some 200 such people in the city, and nearly 800 in the exclusion zone) have already heard about the idea. “This will be a mini-Chornobyl Zone,” Chornobyl squatter Halyna Voloshyna said. “The place where they are going to build is covered with weeds, so it would be good if somebody took care of it. Every population centre will be marked with an obelisk and plates indicating how many people were evacuated from it.” The park will likely become a tourist attraction. According to Maryna Poliakova, a department head at the Chornobylinterinform Company (which organizes tours to the Zone of Exclusion), some 7,000 people visited the Chornobyl Zone last year, and some 5,000 came just in the seven months of this year. Tourists follow a special route where radiation levels are not very high.