Fabijoniškės

Where it sits. Fabijoniškės is a residential district in the northern part of Vilnius, roughly five kilometres from the old town, built in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the land of a village of the same name. It belongs to the northern ring of large housing estates that also includes Šeškinė, Justiniškės and Pašilaičiai, laid out on rolling ground so that the blocks step up and down the slopes rather than sitting on a flat plain. Ateities gatvė runs along its eastern side towards the Santariškės hospital campus. Tens of thousands of people live here, in a district that was among the last built to Soviet urban planning standards anywhere in the Baltic states before independence in 1990.

What kind of place it is. This is a mikrorayon, the standard Soviet planning unit: apartment blocks of five, nine and twelve storeys arranged around shared courtyards, with a kindergarten, a school, a clinic and a shop within walking distance of every entrance, and traffic kept to the perimeter roads. The blocks are prefabricated concrete panel construction, assembled from factory-made units and finished in pale grey, ochre or tile facing. Fabijoniškės is unusually symmetrical even by the standards of the type, which is precisely what made it useful to a film crew. Thirty-five years on it is an ordinary working district with cars in the courtyards, satellite dishes on balconies, and mature trees that have grown tall enough to soften the geometry.

On screen: standing in for Pripyat. In 2018 the district became the principal filming location for Chernobyl, the HBO and Sky miniseries written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, broadcast in May 2019. Renck could not shoot in the real Pripyat, and Fabijoniškės was chosen because its blocks, courtyards, playgrounds and public buildings closely match the architecture of the Ukrainian atomic city built in the 1970s. Almost every exterior showing Pripyat in the series was filmed here: the streets where residents watch the reactor burn from a distance, the playgrounds, the stairwells, the evacuation sequences with buses filling the roads. The production spent 60 of its 88 shooting days in Vilnius.

How the shoot worked. The district was not emptied. People continued to live in the buildings while the crew dressed the streets with period Soviet signage, vehicles, laundry lines and window details, and the city authorities cooperated in adapting sections to look like Ukraine in 1986. Other Vilnius locations filled out the series: the neighbouring estate of Justiniškės, the former KGB headquarters on Gedimino prospektas now operating as the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, the Culture House of the Ministry of the Interior, the architecture faculty of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, and a former government guest house. The result was a production that put Lithuania on the international location map more effectively than any tourism campaign had managed.

What is actually there today. Nothing is marked, and there is no visitor centre. Fabijoniškės is a functioning neighbourhood, and the interest for a traveller is in recognising ordinary things: the specific angle of a stairwell entrance, a courtyard with the same playground geometry seen on screen, the long horizontal runs of balconies. Guided tours from Vilnius do cover the district and can point out the exact frames, which is worth it for anyone who cares about the match between location and shot. Visitors arriving independently should behave as they would in any residential street anywhere, since these are people's homes rather than a set.

The wider context. Vilnius holds an unusually complete record of twentieth-century European history within a few kilometres. The baroque old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994, sits to the south. Between it and Fabijoniškės lie the Karoliniškės district and the television tower where Soviet troops killed fourteen civilians in January 1991, an event with its own memorial and museum. The estates themselves are increasingly studied as heritage rather than dismissed as filler, and a growing body of Lithuanian architectural writing treats them as the last coherent urban project of the Soviet period. Roughly a third of Vilnius still lives in blocks of this kind, and renovation programmes wrapping them in insulation and repainting them are steadily changing how they look, which means the version of Fabijoniškės that appeared on screen is already partly historical.

Getting there and timing. Trolleybus and bus routes connect Fabijoniškės to the centre in about twenty to thirty minutes, and taxis and ride-hailing are inexpensive. There are no entrance fees, no opening hours and no seasonality in the usual sense. Photographers tend to prefer overcast days and the low light of late autumn, which is the register the series itself used; in high summer, with trees in full leaf and children in the courtyards, the district looks nothing like the version that reached television screens, which is arguably the more interesting visit. Vilnius has since attracted further international productions on the strength of the Chernobyl shoot, and the city's film commission actively markets these estates, so the district is likely to keep appearing under other names.