Kopachi Kindergarten

Kopachi was a village near Chernobyl, Ukraine, just south-west of the Pripyat River Basin. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 the village was contaminated by fallout and subsequently evacuated and is now within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; and thus has been abandoned since 1986.

After Kopachi village was evacuated by the authorities, as an experiment, had all the houses torn down and buried. This village was the only village suffering this fate as a result of the Chernobyl disaster.

The only traces left of the village today is a series of mounds and a small number of surviving trees which are not part of the local native flora. Each mound contains the remains of one house and is topped by a sign with the international radiation symbol. The Chernobyl disaster highly contaminated Kopachi with high-level radioactive fallout. A kindergarten and one other brick building are the only architectural structures that remain standing, all other buildings were bulldozed. The government did not recognize the fact that these highly-contaminated buildings and houses would seep radioactive isotopes into the water table. Burying the buildings drove radio-toxins deeper into the environment. The soil and water surrounding the former village remain contaminated with radioactive materials including plutonium, strontium-90, and cesium-137. Other villages in the exclusion zone faced a similar fate, thus polluting the aquifer.