On the northeastern outskirts of the ghost city of Pripyat, with its eerily abandoned concrete apartment blocks, lies a little village most people have never heard of. You won’t find many tourists there—no iconic photos like those of the Pripyat Ferris wheel or the amusement park, just a few overgrown, muddy paths, some collapsing homes, and the quiet kind of sadness that stays with you. That’s the village of Semykhody (Семиходи in Ukrainian), also known as Semikhody, the Russian spelling of its name.
Wandering through what now resembles a forest more than a human settlement, I thought about the people who had spent their entire lives with little access to the “big world” – working the land, fishing, and enjoying the slow pace of quiet rural life. One day they woke up next to a buzzing construction site: 16-story buildings, modern shops, and a nuclear power plant on the horizon.
Even before the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Semykhody was already largely gone, with many houses demolished to make room for the ever-growing Pripyat.
But then April 26 happened.
When Reactor No. 4 exploded, everything changed. Semykhody was just a few miles from ground zero. The radiation didn’t care how small or unimportant the settlement was, so all its inhabitants had to be evacuated. Most thought they’d be back in a few days. There’s almost nothing left of it now, only empty homes with doors hanging open, wallpaper peeling off the walls, dog houses and wells barely visible among the overgrown trees.
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