In the spring of 1986, an explosion tore the roof off Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. In the days that followed, more than a hundred thousand people were evacuated from a zone stretching thirty kilometers around the plant. They were told they would be gone for three days. Most of them never came home.
But some did. Not immediately, and not officially — the zone was sealed, and returning was forbidden. Some of the evacuees slipped back anyway, into villages the state had declared permanently contaminated. They are known by a word that means, roughly, "self-settlers": the samosely. They came home to houses that had been abandoned, to wells that everyone else had been told never to drink from, and they stayed.
At their peak, estimates suggested that around a thousand people — most of them elderly, most of them women — had crept back into the zone. Over the decades the number fell, as it does anywhere in an aging, shrinking community. In the mid-2000s, official counts put the population of the zone at a few hundred; by the late 2010s, it was around a hundred and thirty, and the number has kept drifting down since. They live in villages that look almost normal for the Soviet countryside of the 1930s, because they never modernized — the clocks in their kitchens stopped in 1986, and so, in a way, did their world.
Their reasons were rarely complicated. Some said they had no other home to go to; the shelter the government offered in apartment blocks was strange and, to them, worse than a poisoned village. Some said they wanted to die where their families were buried. Some simply could not live anywhere else. Their food grows in the soil the government says is radioactive. Their water comes from wells the maps say should not be used. Scientists who study them have found, over the long term, surprisingly little — which is part of why they have become so interesting to the world: a group of people living in a place that is officially unlivable, and simply not dying of it on any dramatic schedule.
A 2015 documentary, "The Babushkas of Chernobyl," brought their lives to a wide audience. In it, the women — grandmothers, mostly — talk about their gardens, their chickens, their fear of the forest at night, and also about the thing they share with everyone else who has ever left a place they loved. Some of them, asked why they came back, gave answers that had nothing to do with radiation at all. One said simply that it was home. Another said: "Everything that belonged to my family is here." A third, on being told her zone might be dangerous, offered the kind of logic only someone who has already decided how she wants to live could offer: she said she would rather live in a place where she was happy and where her mother was buried than in a strange apartment with running water.
There is a strange paradox in the zone today. Because humans left, nature moved in. The forest has grown back over the abandoned villages, and animals that had long vanished from the region — wolves, wild boar, and even bears — were reported in numbers not seen for a century. The exclusion zone, poisoned for people, has quietly become one of the largest wildlife refuges in Europe. And what was once a forbidden dead zone has, in an odd turn, also become a place people visit: guided tours bus thousands of tourists a year through the abandoned streets of Pripyat, past the ferris wheel that never opened. The samosely watch them from their gardens, living in the same space as the tourists and the wolves, the last residents of a place everyone else only passes through.
Then, in 2022, the war came. Russian forces occupied the exclusion zone for several weeks, and many of the remaining samosely were trapped without power, without safety, and with soldiers in their yards. Some died during that period; the zone became, once again, a place that people had to flee. The samosely are among the last human witnesses to the world that Chernobyl made: the world where a whole civilization was told, with charts and maps and science, that home was no longer a place anyone could live.
Their story is often told as a story about radiation, but it is really a story about what "home" can outweigh. They did not return because they did not believe the scientists. Many of them did. They returned because something they valued more than safety was waiting there — a grave, a garden, a house that still knew their name. It is a calculation almost everyone makes at some point in a life, though rarely so starkly: what is worth going back for? The people of the zone answered it out loud, and then lived in the answer.
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