Haunting Pictures Reveal The Eerie Beauty Of Chernobyl

    Pripyat was once a thriving city, home to 50,000 people. Then nuclear disaster struck.

    On 26 April 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine - the worst nuclear accident in history - led to the evacuation of nearby city Pripyat. It remains abandoned to this day.

    An abandoned classroom.

    A toilet block in the abandoned city.

    The ferris wheel at Pripyat's "Luna Park".

    The school dormitory contains a chilling mixture of children's toys and gas masks.

    Looters tried removing this piano from an apartment building, but couldn't fit it in an elevator.

    The kitchen in a seventh floor apartment in the abandoned city.

    Colourful propaganda posters.

    An abandoned bus is left to rust.

    A holiday camp in the forest was once decorated with colourful cartoon characters.

    Chernobyl's train station lies a little way outside of Pripyat, its platforms and carriages left abandoned.

    View from the cab of an old freight engine, left to rust on the tracks at Chernobyl Station.

    A discarded toy outside the school in Pripyatt, Ukraine.

    After the disaster, scientists tested fish from the river to monitor radiation levels.

    Many children would stay overnight at the kindergarten, and the dormitory room is piled high with rusted beds and cots.

    Dolls and books lie scattered around the derelict kindergarten.

    At this abandoned scientific centre inside the exclusion zone, notebooks and schematics lie scattered about.

    At a rural kindergarten, a faded poster advises children on road safety.