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Chernobyl, 27 Years Later

For more photos from Chernobyl, check out the Chernobyl and Pripyat (Припять) location pages, or search for photos tagged with #Pripyat, #Припять, #Chernobyl and #Чернобыль.

On this day 27 years ago, an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat, Ukraine, killed dozens of people and released a plume of radioactive fallout that would eventually require the relocation of more than 350,000 people.

The event ranks as the worst nuclear disaster in history. The area immediately surrounding Chernobyl is still too radioactive for habitation and will remain so for another 20,000 years. Until recently, an exclusion zone of 19 miles (30 km) extended in all directions from the power plant, which is now entombed in concrete. In 2011, however, Ukraine opened up this area to tourists, giving the world a peek into a town abandoned and untouched for nearly three decades.

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Hashtag Highlight: #followmeto with @muradosmann and @yourleo

Russian photographer Murad Osmann (@muradosmann) and his girlfriend Nataly Zakharova (@yourleo) travel constantly for work and they’ve come up with a unique and romantic perspective for sharing their experiences around the globe on Instagram that has caught the attention of publications like the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post. The entire project actually started as an accident: “I was taking pictures of everything and Nataly got annoyed, so she dragged me forward to move on. That’s how the first #followmeto was taken, and I quite liked the result so we have continued the series ever since.” Murad started using the hashtag #followmeto to catalog photos of Nataly leading him to landmarks and exotic places.

Be sure to follow Murad (@muradosmann) and Nataly (@yourleo) on Instagram for more of their around-the-world photos and a behind-the-scenes look at how to take them yourself!