No life is possible in the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl. It is a restricted area and the ground is heavily contaminated, it is not safe out there. Yet this area is inhabited permanently by ca. 140 Samosely or Self settlers and over 2500 people are working on a daily basis in- and around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP).

While the evacuation of the area (village by village) was still in full swing in 1986, some of the first residents started to move back to their old homes. Many of them were neither willing nor able to adjust to the new situation. They wanted to live in their birthplace, close to graves of their ancestors and their dead children, not with distant relatives they hardly knew. They didn’t want to spend their time in tenement or apartment blocks specially prepared for them in Kiev. These were country folk, they lived in the great outdoors. Their feet were used to dirt roads, their hands gnarled from tending the vegetable patch. Their hens and rabbits didn’t belong on a balcony. They missed their own tables, chairs and beds. People started moving back to the zone illegally, squeezing through the barbed wire under cover of darkness. Some of the villagers were evacuated more than once. In 1987, the government started turning a blind eye to people moving back to their former homes. You return to your birthplace because it’s the only place you know. Despite the radiation, the contaminated ground and the polluted water. You know where you are with your own vegetable patch, your own hens and your own well. Bound to native ground.

The population of Pripyat was also evacuated. They had moved there from all across the Soviet Union to live in the ‘City of the Future’. After the disaster, they once again found themselves spread around the Soviet Union living with family and working in other nuclear power plants. Two years later, when the replacement City of the Future (Slavutych) was ready, they returned to the region. It was a new, modern city, with every conceivable amenity. It was a place where they could live ‘safely’ and raise their children, bound to the ground where they themselves had grown up.

Together with Sophieke Thurmer (text) I made a book of these inhabitants. In this book we take you along on our journey through the Zone and we tell the stories of these remarkable people.

For more information or buying the book, please email info@estherhessingfotografie.nl

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