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Despite different opinions, Pripyat and Chernobyl are absolutely different cities.

Pripyat is about 2 km (on a straight line) from the Chernobyl NPP. At the time of the
accident there lived about 49 thousand people of 134 nationalities from the USSR. Average
age of inhabitants made 26 years. Annually more than one thousand children were born
there. This city directly belonged to the Chernobyl NPP which was the city-forming
enterprise.

Chernobyl is the city located at the distance about 12 km from the nuclear power plant with
the population before the accident about 14 thousand people. This city had never had any
serious relation to the nuclear power plant.

Both cities were in the territory of the Chernobyl district of Kiev region and the station
received its name after the name of the district where it was located. Nowadays this district is
included into Ivankov region.

In chronicles Chernobyl is mentioned for the first time in 1193.

After overthrow of the Tatar yoke it made a special settlement which became a town in
1566. In 1775 dissenters from the Starodubsky district moved here. There were 3 parish
schools. The town had 14362 inhabitants, water mills, 2 orthodox churches and a church
which was constructed at the beginning of the XVI century. Till 1832 there was a Dominican
monastery. There was an out-patient hospital, drugstore, Jewish almshouse, 3 big fairs. The
main occupations of inhabitants were navigation, fishery and truck farming.