Chernobyl’s last wedding: The couple who married as a nuclear disaster unfolded

April 26, 1986, marked a day that would forever alter the lives of Iryna Stetsenko and Serhiy Lobanov. Just after midnight, Iryna had finished her nail care, opened the balcony door, and struggled to calm her nerves before bed. In the same building, her fiancé Serhiy slept on a kitchen mattress, unaware that a catastrophe was about to begin. A sudden “rumble” shattered the silence, she recalls, “like distant aircraft overhead, with the windows trembling as if caught in a sudden gust.” Serhiy, meanwhile, felt a similar tremor, thinking it might be a mild earthquake, and drifted back into sleep.

“It was as if a lot of planes were flying overhead, everything was humming and the glass in the windows shook,” says Iryna.

“I felt a shake, as if some kind of wave passed,” Serhiy adds. “I wondered if it was an earthquake, but soon realized it was something else.”

At 19, Iryna was a trainee teacher, while Serhiy, 25, worked at the Chernobyl power plant. They envisioned a bright future in Pripyat, a newly constructed Soviet city. Little did they know, Reactor Four at the plant—located in what is now northern Ukraine—was about to explode, releasing radioactive material that would blanket much of Europe. Four decades later, the site stands in a war-torn region, yet the couple now reside in Berlin, fleeing conflict rather than radiation.

The Day of the Disaster

By dawn, Serhiy awoke to a sunny day, brimming with anticipation for his wedding. He had errands: bed linens for the night’s stay at a friend’s apartment and flowers for the bouquet. Outside, he noticed men in gas masks and others scrubbing the streets with a foamy solution. Colleagues from the plant informed him of an urgent event, though details were scarce. From the high-rise window, he spotted smoke rising from Reactor Four. That night, workers and firefighters had fought the blaze under lethal radiation exposure.

“I felt a bit anxious,” Serhiy says. “Drawing on my training, I took some fabric, wet it, and draped it over the entrance to block radioactive dust.”

Iryna, staying with her mother, heard the phone ring repeatedly. Her mother sounded “alarmed,” she recalls, as neighbors shared news of “something terrible” occurring. Yet no specifics emerged, as Soviet authorities tightly controlled information. When they turned on the radio, there was no mention of an incident. The government advised them to proceed with planned events, including the wedding.

A Wedding in the Shadow of Chaos

That morning, the couple and guests traveled in a line of cars to the Palace of Culture, a venue known for both ceremonies and popular discos. They stood on a cloth embroidered with their names to exchange vows, then moved to a nearby café with their guests. However, the wedding banquet carried a somber tone, Serhiy notes. “Everyone understood that something had happened, but no one knew the details,” he says.

“We just hugged each other and moved in the hug,” Iryna remembers about their first dance, which they had rehearsed as a traditional waltz. “From the first steps, we went out of rhythm.”

After the ceremony, they returned to the friend’s apartment. But by the early hours of Sunday, another friend arrived with urgent news: an evacuation train was set to depart at 5am. Iryna, with only a second-day dress in her possession, put her wedding attire back on to race to her mother’s apartment. Her shoes had caused blisters, so she ran barefoot through puddles, the glow of the collapsed reactor visible from the train.

The Aftermath and Evacuation

Initially, the evacuation was labeled “temporary,” Serhiy says. “We left for three days, but ended up going for our entire lives.” The Soviet Union faced harsh criticism for its delayed response, with the full scale of the disaster only becoming clear two days after the explosion. Today, the couple’s story is a poignant reminder of the day they exchanged vows amidst the dawn of a nuclear catastrophe.