Homesick for Chernobyl Every year the Ukrainian government grants permission to the former inhabitants of the abandoned villages of Chernobyl's exclusion zone to revisit the graves of deceased relatives and friends. But they also take this opportunity to revisit the ruins they still call home, traveling as far as 400 km to reunite with people who used to walk the same streets, browse the same stores... people they used to call neighbors. I was guided through this wilderness of broken dreams. I visited the villages, the homes, the places where these people used to work, witnessing the fragments left over from the lives they used to lead, and listening to memories so vividly recalled that I could almost smell the fruit from the withered apple trees that once flourished. For the people from villages such as Ilovnitsa, Paryshiv, Korogod or city of Chernobyl, it's a heart-breaking ritual... a day to remember the place that used to be their home in a region that was said to be too beautiful to locate the power station that was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, in April, 1986.
