Kopachi Kindergarten

Kopachi village is located four kilometers south of the Chernobyl Power Plant. Its kindergarten lies on the road between Pripyat and Chernobyl. The village had a population of 1114 in 1986. The 1986 disaster highly contaminated Kopachi with high-level radioactive fallout.

Only this kindergarten building and the ruins of a machine and tractor station have been preserved of the village. All other buildings were bulldozed and buried, house by house. For this, a trench was dug in front of the building, after which the engineering demolition machine ‘IMR-1’ destroyed the house and buried it. The government did not recognize the fact that these highly-contaminated buildings and houses would seep radioactive isotopes into the groundwater.

The kindergarten was built in 1967, a tin-plate on the facade tells us: ‘Built in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Great October Revolution’. The building is very beautiful. The architecture is very different from the square Soviet buildings of Pripyat. It features a Palladian style in brick. Experts suggest that it will survive the Soviet high-rise buildings of Pripyat.

If you enter the building, you can see children’s lockers with toys on one side of the hall. There is a corner for parents on the other side. Further along the corridors, you can enter two bedrooms and a library.

The surviving kindergarten building in Kopachi and its interior was shown in the documentary film “Life after People” as part of the story about the city of Pripyat. The Kindergarten survived a close forest fire in 2020.