'Cultural Rescue' in the Chornobyl Zone: Documenting Traditional Culture in a Post-Apocalyptic Environment

The Stuart Weitzman School of Design Graduate Program in Historic Preservation is hosting a lecture by Myron O. Stachiw, Architectural Historian, Independent Scholar/Consultant, on Wednesday, October 2, 2019. Advance registration will be required by September 27. The lecture is about the concurrent exhibition “Chornobyl +20: this is our land, we still live here” which documents through photographs and text the disaster and its impacts on the people, lands, and culture of Polissia. Reception to follow. 

On April 26, 1986, a planned test during a routine maintenance shut-down of Reactor #4 at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station went awry and resulted in an explosion and partial meltdown of the reactor core.  Over the next 10 days, the burning reactor spewed more than 50 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date.

Radiation was spread across the European continent, with the worst fallout occurring in neighboring Belarus and Ukraine.  Within days of the explosion more than 116,000 people were evacuated from the area within a 30 mile radius of the damaged reactor.   Over the ensuing months and years, as the radioactive fallout was measured and mapped across the region, several hundred thousand additional residents of the irradiated territories were relocated.  Thousands more residents living in less–intensely irradiated territories voluntarily moved away to protect their children from the little-known effects of prolonged low-level radiation exposure.

The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station was erected in the heavily-wooded, swampy, and sparsely-settled forest land of Polissia in the north-central region of Ukraine.  Settlements consisted largely of small villages clustered around collective farms where cattle, flax, hops, and grains were raised.  European and Ukrainian ethnographers and folklorists have long identified the cultural traditions of the residents of this region as the most archaic in all of Ukraine, and the least-studied as a result of the isolation of the region and the absence of pressures and threats of modern industrial and population development during the 20th century.  
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resulting independence of Ukraine, scholars in the newly-sovereign state became concerned with the manner in which the Soviet Union had attempted to mitigate the effects of the disaster.  Within the exclusion zone entire villages were bulldozed and buried, wiping away all traces of their existence without any scholarly study or documentation of the material and spiritual cultural traditions of its residents.  The result was the initiation of more than a decade of expeditions into the irradiated territories by groups of ethnographers, folklorists, architectural historians, linguists, material culture specialists, and others.   They visited abandoned and sparsely-populated villages in the exclusion zone around the damaged reactor, still-occupied villages in the less-intensely irradiated territories of Polissia , as well as the places where the former residents were relocated and settled.   Their mission was one I have called “cultural rescue” – an attempt to document the surviving traditional culture – both tangible and intangible – of the people of Polissia.  From 2004 -2006 I joined these expeditions and traveled repeatedly into the irradiated territories to document the work of these scholars and the daily lives of the people still residing within the irradiated territories 20 years after the disaster.  The exhibition “Chornobyl +20: this is our land, we still live here” documents through photographs and text the disaster and its impacts on the people, lands, and culture of Polissia.

Myron Stachiw is an educator, historian, archaeologist, and architectural historian. During the past four decades he has worked as a museum professional, university professor, and educational administrator in the U.S. and in Ukraine.  He is currently engaged as a consultant in architectural history to museums; historical agencies; and state and local preservation organizations and agencies, focusing on the preparation of historic structure reports.  This past summer he helped to organize and teach a two-week workshop in Ukraine focused on conducting a conservation assessment of a Ukrainian wooden church erected c.1693.

Stachiw lived in Ukraine from 2004 – 2012, first as a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award (2004-2006) and then as the director of the Fulbright Program in Ukraine and the Ukraine Office of the Institute of International Education (2006-2012).  The focus of his Fulbright Scholar project was a study of the process of cultural rescue undertaken by Ukrainian scholars within the heavily irradiated territories of Ukraine resulting from the April 26, 1986, Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant reactor explosion and subsequent emission of massive quantities of radioactive material.  The region most impacted by the radioactive fallout and forced evacuation, Polissia, was home to the most archaic of Ukrainian regional traditional cultures, and also the least studied.  Stachiw participated in several extended expeditions to the region with Ukrainian folklorists, ethnographers, architectural historians, and material culture specialists, as well as many private trips to document the impacts of the disaster on the people and landscapes of Polissia.  

A product of his research was a large photographic exhibition titled “Chornobyl + 20:  This is Our Land, We Still Live Here,” which was shown simultaneously in Kyiv, Ukraine and New York in 2006.  The exhibition documents the Chornobyl disaster and its impacts on the landscapes and people of Polissia - those who remain in or have returned to the irradiated territories, and those who have been forced to leave.