In fact, there are many reasons why once prosperous towns, villages or individual buildings fall into disrepair. This could be the consequences of a military conflict, a devastating natural or human-made disaster, or simply due to changes in economic conditions. Just remember how many towns or settlements in the West of the United States that owed their heyday to the gold rush were abandoned when nearby gold deposits exhausted their potential.

We must also not forget the destructive consequences of human activity - for example, one of the northern districts of the city of Famagusta in Cyprus has been abandoned since 1974 as a result of a military conflict, and only in 2020 were civilians able to visit it again. Or the site of perhaps the most notorious human-made disaster in the world - the so-called ‘Exclusion Zone’ around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which arose in 1986 after the accident.

And people who have been there bring dozens, hundreds of photographs, frightening with their lifeless, eerie aesthetics, the terrible beauty of nature, desperately trying to heal the wounds left by humankind...

“I also had the opportunity to visit the Exclusion Zone - where the level of radiation allows a person to stay for a short time,” says Ivan Strahov, a photographer from Odessa, Ukraine, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment here. “This is an incredible, incomparable impression. The evacuation of the inhabitants was carried out on an emergency basis, so the state of things in towns and villages has hardly changed for almost forty years. A lifeless kingdom of decay, rust, trees and silence...”

“I photographed many other abandoned objects - houses, sunken ships, abandoned cars and carriages - and I can say that these photographs still evoke some strange, subtle, poignant feeling. As if we, people, created them, endowed them with a peculiar semblance of life - and then they were left to live out their lives alone. In the end, anyone who looks at such a photo can invent stories about the times when there was life there. And this, probably, is the main charm,” Ivan ponders.

And now let’s just scroll this list to the very end, mentally walk through these dilapidated rooms and corridors, imagine that the blind gaps of the windows are filled with light and life, try to imagine who lived here and when... and then our own lives will probably seem even more valuable for us all. Or just simply look and enjoy this wild beauty of oblivion, because it is really worth your time and attention!