On the night of April 25, 1986, 19-year-old Iryna Stetsenko was battling pre-wedding nerves in her Pripyat apartment, while her 25-year-old fiancé, Serhiy Lobanov, slept on a kitchen mattress nearby. Their quiet was shattered by a deep rumble that shook the windows, which Iryna described as a swarm of planes and Serhiy dismissed as a mild earthquake. Unbeknownst to the trainee teacher and the power plant engineer, reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, less than 2.5 miles (4km) away, had just exploded, initiating the world's worst nuclear disaster. They went back to sleep, blissfully unaware that their wedding day would be historically grim.
Serhiy woke at 6am to a gloriously sunny April 26, full of excitement for his errands: delivering bed linen and buying flowers. His cheer was dampened by the sight of soldiers in gas masks and men washing the streets with a foamy solution. Colleagues from the nuclear plant told him they'd been urgently called in because 'something happened,' and from a high-rise window, he spotted smoke rising from reactor four. Applying his training, he wet some fabric and placed it across the apartment door to catch radioactive dust, a uniquely Soviet wedding-day chore. He then found a deserted market and picked five tulips for the bouquet.
Meanwhile, at her mother's apartment, Iryna was fielding alarmed phone calls from neighbors about 'something terrible.' In the information vacuum of the Soviet Union, the radio was silent, and a call to authorities yielded only the instruction not to panic and that all planned events should proceed. So, children were sent to school, and the wedding party drove in a line of cars to the Palace of Culture. There, the couple made their vows standing on a cloth embroidered with their names, a traditional gesture now forever linked to catastrophe.
The subsequent wedding banquet at a nearby café was, by Serhiy's account, 'sad,' as everyone sensed a tragedy without knowing the details. Their carefully practiced first dance, a traditional waltz, fell apart immediately. 'From the first steps we went out of rhythm,' Iryna recalls. 'We just hugged each other and moved in the hug.' Exhausted, they retired to a friend's apartment, only to be awakened in the early hours of Sunday by a frantic knock. A friend told them to rush to a 5am evacuation train, forcing Iryna to put her wedding dress back on over her blistered feet to run home for a change of clothes, a final, absurd dash from a collapsing world.