Corona, Gdańsk, Book, Chernobyl

Hello subscribers!

This week there has been only one new post, “Dark Tourism & Corona”, on the DT Blog, to mark the fact that it’s been roughly a year since the coronavirus pandemic forced almost all of us into lockdown for the first time.

At that time I posted on my then DT page on Facebook a lot of photos and associated texts relating in some way to the coronavirus … or rather images that could be reinterpreted in a way relating to the pandemic. So I lifted all those photos/posts from my archive of FB posts and turned them into a rather longish blog post, with 14 photos. It’s a bit of time-travel, as it were. Here and there I added little comments from today’s perspective, now that we know a lot more about the whole topic and have seen how it developed over the course of this past year. Now let’s hope that 2021 will finally see the end of the crisis and we can go travelling again.

The photo above was a little joke – it actually shows a kind of orthopaedic massage ball, but its shape is so reminiscent of those images of the coronavirus we see every day in the media that I’m sure you must have instantly made the connection too.
  

On my main website a detailed new chapter has gone up, namely about the superb Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland. New chapters about the European Solidarity Centre and the Gdańsk shipyards will go up soon too, but I still have to finalize those and then also write the updates for the other Gdańsk chapters.
  

I got a little distracted from my work on the website, a) by technical problems, and b) by the fact that the proofs of front and end matter and corrected pages for my book were sent to me by the publishers for final checking. This is now done, so from now on any remaining errors or flaws in the book can no longer be put right. I know there will never be 100% perfection, but I hope we have ironed out all the really significant issues. I think it’s looking quite good. What I still haven’t received from the publishers, though, is the cover page. But they said I should have that any day now, so in the next newsletter I should finally be able to share that with you.
  

I’ve meanwhile watched the “Inside Chernobyl” TV programme with Ben Fogle once again. I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, the programme is absolutely fascinating, Ben Fogle is his usual likeable and enthusiastic self, and the film footage of the Zone, Pripyat, Duga and the NPP is outstanding. On the other hand, there are also a few things I find a bit … well, let’s say: odd …

The structure and topical emphases made in the programme are strikingly similar to about half of those in that Chernobyl book I recently reviewed, so it seems the film-makers have taken more than just a little inspiration from it (without acknowledging the book, of course); one interviewee, who witnessed the disaster of 26 April 1986, is even the very same person as in the book. The team also visit one of the re-settlers, meet a stalker, and get access to the control room of reactor 4 and to the inside of the New Safe Confinement (NSC) arch over the old sarcophagus … just like the author of that book. And all the while Ben Fogle is making it out that his access to such places is “exclusive” or “unprecedented”. He also repeatedly says that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the “most toxic” region in the world. Neither of this is exactly true, of course. Most of the Zone isn’t so contaminated any more, only a few hotspots are (and they’re not strictly speaking “toxic” at all, i.e. poisonous, but contaminated by radiation – that’s not the same thing!). And the control room of reactor 4 is now even regularly accessible by arrangement (for an extra fee) for any visitor who wants to see it. Access to the inside of the NSC is not, but it, too, had already been granted to other film crews before, so it’s not as unique as this programme makes it out to be.

All of this is just one aspect of a general, massive omission: there’s not a word about Chernobyl as a tourist attraction. If I didn’t know better, I would have got the impression from this Channel 5 programme that the only visitors, other than the privileged Ben Fogle, are the occasional illegal stalkers – who only do it to gain bragging rights online. But of course nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, yes, some stalkers apparently do indeed only care about their social media bragging rights, but it’s much more complex than that and there are other, less ignoble motivations too. And it is rather strange that the programme does not even indicate that normal tourists can also visit Chernobyl – when over 120,000 did so in 2019 alone, before the pandemic halted the tourism boom. But maybe mentioning that would have been at odds with the sensationalism level that this programme, as is usual in the media, cannot quite avoid. It’s not terribly over-sensationalist, but it does come through on several occasions.

So those aspects leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, but otherwise the programme is immensely watchable. You won’t learn all that much that you don’t already know, especially if you follow my blog and website (or read this book), but the film footage alone is absolutely worth watching the programme for. It’s certainly a feast for the eyes.
  

So much for this week.

Have a good next week – and stay safe.

Peter