The Main Post Office Building with the famous Astronaut Painting was a great surprise because we already know this colorful painting with the CCCP sign on his helmet, but we were thinking that it’s quite small. In real life, it’s a whole wall painting, with a woman standing next to the guy, and with a few smaller figures painted also, for example, Egyptian and Middle-age gothic characters. The Soviet mural also features on the DVD cover for Pink Floyd’s “Marooned” single, as well as the music video.

There is also a huge 6m diameter Soviet-era blue-orange mural embossment (probably it’s the post’s coat-of-arms with a sitting woman character) on the exterior wall of the two-story building. Postcards and letters litter the floor.
Unfortunately, we had no more time to discover the other rooms of the post office or the 15 stories high apartment building with the large CCCP crest on the rooftop and the nearby Naworodny Technikum no8‘s larger buildings.

The Naworodny City Vocational Technical School № 8 in Pripyat, was a secondary school. It was specialized for the training of skilled workers in professions that require an advanced educational level. Children were admitted to this technical school after nine years of basic education, or eleven years of basic secondary education. The usual entering age for students was 16. They could study at the school from 1 to 5 years. The Pripyat students, or pupils, lived in a dormitory next door.

The Vocational-Technical School was a standard school in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the countries of the former USSR. Here in Pripyat, students in this school were trained to work in construction as well as technical staff. After graduation, they could work directly on the construction of Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The institution provided bricklayers, plasterers, welders, electricians ad many more technical professions.

In 1974, there were 6028 vocational education institutions in the USSR, and the number of students was 3 million. In 1981, this number exceeded 7 thousand, and the number of students was 3.6 million.

After the Chernobyl disaster and the evacuation of residents, liquidators worked in the vocational school building. As a result, you can see many details for dosimetry equipment and related literature scattered on the floor.

• obsidianurbexphotography.com/pripyat-post-office-shops/
• chernobyl.one/vocational-technical-school-no8-pripyat/