In the early 1970s Varosha was one of the Mediterranean's busiest beach resorts. In August 1974 its people fled the advancing Turkish army, expecting to return within days, and the quarter was fenced off. It stayed sealed for 46 years, and today only parts are open.
In the forests of western Latvia, a closed Soviet town of thousands grew up around radars that watched for missiles coming from the West. The Russians left in 1998, the unfinished giant radar was blown up in 1995, and the empty town is now a training ground for soldiers.
In 1959 the US Army began cutting tunnels into the Greenland ice sheet and built a nuclear-powered camp for up to 200 people. Publicly it was an Arctic research station. Secretly it was a test for a plan to hide hundreds of missiles under the ice. The moving ice defeated it, and the camp was abandoned, leaving waste buried in the snow.
Deep in a forest in north-west Lithuania, about 10,000 Soviet soldiers built an underground base for four nuclear missiles aimed at Western Europe. It was one of the first of its kind, was kept secret for years and was abandoned in 1978. Today one of its silos is a museum.
On the steppe of eastern Kazakhstan the Soviet Union fired its first atomic bomb in 1949 and went on to test more than 450 nuclear devices over 40 years, in an area chosen because Lavrentiy Beria called it uninhabited. It was closed in 1991, and a 17-year operation was needed to secure the plutonium left behind.
Two identical 64-metre dishes were built by one Moscow engineering bureau to talk to spacecraft. One was shut down for lack of money in 1996. The other burned in 2010 and was rebuilt.
A model Soviet city of about 49,000 people, emptied in a single afternoon in April 1986 and never resettled.
A safety test, a reactor with a fatal design flaw and a night shift that never had a chance: how Chernobyl happened, how it was hidden, and what it left behind.
A 150-metre steel wall in the Chernobyl Zone that tapped a mystery signal across the world's shortwave bands, and was never on a Soviet map.
Beside the abandoned city of Pripyat, about 100 kilometres north of Kyiv, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is still being decommissioned. Its story runs from the Soviet reactors that powered the region to the 1986 disaster, later accidents, and the 2022 invasion.
