Atomic Lithuania

Arrive in Vilnius and settle into the Old Town, then an afternoon at the TV tower. It is a fifteen-minute drive from the centre and looks like any other broadcast mast until you read the plaques at the base. In January 1991 Soviet troops took it from unarmed civilians who had come to stand in the way; thirteen died. Lithuania was independent within the year. Its accession to the European Union in 2004 came with a condition: Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, running two Chernobyl-type reactors, would be shut. Over dinner your guide explains what the plant was, why it was built and why the EU insisted it close. Everything you see over the next three days follows from those two facts.

Visaginas is not a Lithuanian town that happens to have Russian speakers. It is a Soviet company town dropped into a pine forest, laid out in numbered microdistricts around a plant that no longer runs, and still majority Russian-speaking. Since the shutdown its population has fallen by a third. Walking it with someone who grew up here is the difference between a curiosity and an actual place.

This is not a museum. Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant is a decommissioning site with an operating licence, a workforce and a schedule that runs to 2038, and the visit is run on their terms: passports checked against a list submitted weeks in advance, a radiation briefing, and a route that can change on the day. What you get in return is a turbine hall five hundred metres long, a control room whose panels are exactly as HBO reproduced them, and the top of an RBMK reactor with the fuel channel caps under your feet.

The Aukštaitija lake country starts twenty minutes from Visaginas and could not be less like it: 126 lakes, pine forest, and wooden villages that have been there since long before anyone split an atom. The sauna is heated over wood on a jetty, and the swim between rounds is the local custom rather than a dare. It is a deliberate end to the trip, so that the last thing you remember is not concrete.