private experience you won't find anywhere else in the different. movements like they're. completely preserved. our guide hopes visitors can help the region around sure noble improve its image and image she says that also must be decontaminated. that tourism or even an image that will element for all of the system of there to mitigate. stand in the consequences of radiation accident including sure lobo you know you. bring people to their ear and at last but no definitely not at least it is the best way to long as the listens over those are huge and important accidents row and i'm kind of proud that i am continuing to. i would think feeney is for it's all of that it could have

wiped out a bottle of bill warm against their former officer for doing over commissions into a mob. battered pieces of furniture are all that their testimony to their lives abruptly event and in previous. liquidators destroyed and buried almost everything. thousands of abandoned pets had to be caught and put down for fear they would carry radioactive dust out of the zone. eerie calm cast a spell on visitors. kilometer

after kilometer surfacing beneath the brushwood empty houses abandoned villages. three hundred fifty thousand people were evacuated from the zone from one day to the next their lives changed forever. they were resettled in other towns and villages wherever there was room. many today live hundreds of kilometers from their former home. and they say why but they walk through an old. community and it's a substantial. role for psychological trauma it's not about what i mean to be true it's about would the loss of collect their way to. their old selves and lead to a place. that maybe while life has returned to some villages in the zone like in cuba about thirty kilometers southeast of the reactor. and her husband even

were resettled following the disaster. they had nothing but the clothes on their backs when they arrived at their designated destination a village one hundred kilometers away but they were never welcome there. did a man on the phone who does some of the locals wanted to stop those of us who'd been resettled from using the well. they threw straw and hay into it so we couldn't they said we don't want you hit your contaminated mud to defame it wasn't possible is that it will be. stigmatised and far from home they could no longer bear it and returned secretly they live here illegally but are tolerated by his own officials to is mostly cleared of radiation but no one knows whether residents aren't consuming radioactive isotopes in home grown food even and maria nevertheless provide for themselves they rule out the possibility of danger.

there is no radioactivity here i don't believe it i've been living here for thirty one years if there was radioactivity i'd be long gone this is my home. today an estimated one hundred forty people live illegally in the zone most are elderly and can't imagine living anywhere else. eighty five year old hannah is one of the returning settlers known as. but behind us as she's fondly known in the zone lives here with her six sister sonia whom she cares for all by herself. the two women wouldn't think of leaving their home again. i'm here this is where i was born in this is well i don't want to move into a retirement home if i can no longer walk someone will bring me water so i can die here. but behind you know is something of

a celebrity in the zone and gets regular visits from tourists. if only. a guide says he's coming around with a large group oh hello. may god protect you oh how many are coming. that's when you drive by's on his place and then come here and. no menu seven people find come on over there you didn't hear the whole. laundry. list public coming to tell me how you like to bring me some coffee that probably. got him. ok i'll make some pancakes for you would i. know that when you can no longer work the fields she depends on the gifts brought by disappears it's hard to

get hold of food. a mobile shop selling the basic necessities comes by once a month at most. ruthless well known god i have the boys to bring me flowers. to the tourists bring me all needles and semolina. the tourists bring everything made me i'm so grateful for these kind hearted people people a little bit loopy. thank you all that head and baba honey what can we bring leah i tell them case here or t.l.c. i can't do without it as i know me she. she serves up a spread of mashed potatoes bacon and lots of vodka. offers homemade food and the chance to visit a real somewhat stately there is no other place in the world like it. is the third tour group of the day is waiting outside her door.

meanwhile sarah he and his group have arrived at the epicenter of the disaster reactor block four. it's the highlight of every tour. here like. this monument you could see the look of the first guess what it was to be really short terms radiation was so high at that point that sometimes people can toward. the walls of the construction only for like. fifteen twenty seconds and that's why it was really hard to do that in a good way. and you sarcophagus or encasement around the reactor was completed in twenty eighteen. a multinational project that cost more than two billion euros the giant steel shelter is designed to contain radiation from the plant for the next century but it's still only a temporary solution. deep inside is the molten core of the reactor known as the

most toxic chunk of waste in the world just a few minutes expose.