Dead Villages in Exclusion Zone

The Exclusion Zone has 188 settlements. Among them are only two cities; the rest are Dead villages, from small settlements of a few dozen houses to fairly large, urban-type settlements. Time, fire, decontamination, and purposeful elimination destroyed human settlements. As a result, there are only two signs along a road, at the beginning and at the end of a settlement; and in between, ruins. Sometimes even those are no longer there, only the grass-covered hills along the site of former streets. This is what the three buried villages near the Chernobyl NPP look like.

Often these places are like an abandoned ethnographic museum under the open sky, the exhibits of which date back to the 17th and 18th centuries. One may find a wooden spinning wheel (on which they spun without a spindle, pulling the thread out of the tow with one hand and pressing the pedal with the foot); old wood stoves; cozy wicker cottages made from the flexible branches of filberts – wooden huts (kolyba) – under thatched roofs and lilac thickets. Time has gone with the people, and now history rules here.

This article was published in the book Interesting Chernobyl.
You could download this book in PDF file for free here.

© Sky Horse Publishing House (Kyiv) / Nahs Haus, 2019
Copying and publication of this article is possible only with the written permission of the publishing house.
Official website of the Awesome Heritage series: awesomeheritage.com

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