The Shopping Center and Restaurant Pripyat

A large abandoned Supermarket sits on Lazareva Street, across from Lenin Square. The ground floor originally sold food, and the huge freezers and cabinets lie empty and broken. Shopping carts are scattered among the aisles. Decades of vandalism and looting have taken their toll, but the checkout signs can still be seen attached to the roof, with a lonely shopping cart below them. In the early 1980s, this would have been a state-of-the-art supermarket, very large by usual standards. This Supermarket formed part of a larger shopping mall, the upper floors selling non-food items. This prestigious supermarket apparently was one of the only places where luxury items could be bought in the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The central supermarket was one of the largest in Pripyat. It is located right at the main square. The ground floor was mainly for food and had huge freezer cabinets. The now rusty freezers were emptied in 1987, the food was buried by the female liquidators to stop the spread of infectious diseases. On the first floor of the supermarket was a restaurant with a nice view across Pripyat’s Lenin Square.

This supermarket was one of the largest in Pripyat. The grocery store was called “Voshod”, which means “sunrise” and is located right at the main square. From a distance, it’s not immediately obvious what the original function of the building was until you spot the familiar shape of the shopping trollies sitting outside. Peering through the windows, the metal frames long since removed, there are further trolleys and beyond, rows of freezer cabinets emerge from the gloom flanking the aisles where shoppers haven’t walked for decades. Signs still proudly hang from the ceiling proclaiming the food types once located below. Light fittings, plaster, and furniture lay scattered across the floor.

Behind the Furniture Shop, there was an Electrical Goods Shop which housed many models of appliance which could also be found inside the Pripyat apartment blocks.

Since Pripyat was a city built to house the personnel working at the nearby nuclear power plant a lot of highly educated and well-payed people lived in the town, so this was one of the best supermarkets in the Soviet Union.  This was was one of the few places in the Soviet Union that actually sold Chanel Nº 5. Upstairs, where once the inhabitants of Pripyat would have shopped for furniture to furnish their new flat, the sodden remains of the ceiling cover the floor. Strip lights rust in lines where they’ve fallen. The first floor, reserved for non-food items, was in even worse shape. With all the shelves gone and the ceiling cladding, including all the lamps, crashed to the ground the whole floor made the impression as if it could collapse at any time – that feeling was boosted by the fact that the ceiling remains were softened over the past two decades by the forces of nature; even walking there gave me the creeps. The view across Pripyat’s Lenin Square to the city’s most famous hotel “Polissya” was nice though…

Without the floor-length windows of the ground floor, it is dark, damp, and particularly unpleasant.

The ground floor was mainly for food and the huge freezer cabinets with their isolation containers cracked open made the place look rather creepy. The entire floor was in disarray with shopping carts, shelves, and a bunch of broken furniture scattered all over the ground – pretty much the only things unharmed were the signs showing where the aisles once were.

• abandonedkansai.com/zone-of-alienation-pripyat-supermarket/
• obsidianurbexphotography.com/pripyat-post-office-shops/
• chernobylgallery.com/galleries/supermarket/
• travelblogeurope.com/the-grocery-store-in-pripyat-abandoned-for-30-years/
• chernobyl.one/pripyat-retail/