A Ukrainian couple have got married in the town of Chernobyl, in the first wedding there since a massive nuclear disaster 14 years ago turned the place into a ghost-town, press reports said Saturday.
Facti daily reported that 19-year-old Marina Pachina wanted to get married in the church where she was born and lived for the first five years of her life, before reactor number four at the Chernobyl's nuclear plant exploded in April 1986.
She and 100,000 other people living around the reactor, including Chernobyl's 13,000 residents, were evacuated as nuclear radiation was spewed into the atmosphere in the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.
The groom, 26-year-old Mikhailo Nalepa, who comes from a small town near the capital Kiev, did not mind getting married in Chernobyl, Facti reported.
It did not give the date of the wedding.
The only people who have returned to Chernobyl since the disaster are some 600 elderly former inhabitants who said they wanted to come back there to die.
An estimated 15,000 to 30,000 people have died as a result of the disaster.
The crippled nuclear plant, which still provides around five percent of Ukraine's electricity, is due to close on December 15 under an internationally-brokered agreement – KIEV (AFP)
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