Ukraine’s Poisoned Past

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — Nature has done its ruthless work. The main soccer stadium is now a football forest. Birches and poplars have crowded the field, pushed through the asphalt running track, blocked an entrance to the grandstand. Moss grows in clumps on concrete steps and sprouts in rotted wooden seats.

Less than two miles away, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded on April 26, 1986. The 50,000 workers and their families who lived here were evacuated by bus, never to return. Pripyat’s apartment blocks became an urban wilderness. The soccer goal posts at School No. 1 are hidden in a thicket of trees, down a leafy path with fresh animal tracks.

“The final match of Euro 2012 will be played here to see who is the strongest,” Maxim Orel, a tour guide for Chernobylinterinform, a department of Ukraine’s Ministry of Emergency, said last week with gallows humor at the abandoned central stadium. “The winners will be mutants.”