ReportAfter having had to leave the “zone” for the first time, during the 1986 nuclear disaster, the inhabitants of this village in the northwest of kyiv had to flee the Russians or go into hiding.
“Two tragedies in less than forty years…” Father Pavlo was not born in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster. The young priest did not even know the Soviet Union, and his red beard seems to have grown too quickly on his childish face. He has been ministering for five years in the Orthodox church of Nove Zalissia, a rural village that stretches gently in a pine forest, about fifty kilometers northwest of kyiv; but he had never heard so much about the nuclear accident as during this atrocious time, between February 26, the date of the arrival of the Russians in the village, and March 31, the day of their departure.
During the “occupation”, he exceptionally left the church open and said mass every morning. “People took a lot of risks to come. » The shooting did not stop, and two shells fell on Nove Zalissia on March 9. Each parishioner left or took away preserves on a table at the entrance. Father Pavlo was reading verse 7 of chapter 7 of the Gospel according to Matthew (“Ask, and it will be given to you” ), praying for ” the peace “ without quoting Kirill, the patriarch of Moscow, close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. It was after the office, in front of the benches in the garden bordering the church, that he guessed that the whisperings of the faithful revolved only around ” that “ : this curse pushing more than half of the 1,200 inhabitants to a new exodus, thirty-six years after Chernobyl. “Twice to tear yourself away from your house, liquidate personal stories, leave without knowing if you will return: it is a double penalty”, says the priest.
Nove Zalissia, “Zalissia the new”, sprang up like a mushroom, during the summer of 1986, to accommodate before the start of the school year the “displaced” of the former village of the “zone”, this security perimeter set up around the former Soviet power station. Zalissia, now in Ukraine, was the birthplace of the family of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, a big village where he used to spend his holidays. Every April 26, the anniversary of the explosion, the priest prays there for the irradiated, after a word from the mayor and a few speeches from “liquidators”, these men intervened on the scene of the disaster to secure the radioactive site. Nove Zalissia lives under the crushing shadow of its original model.
Forty-three days in 6 square meters
On February 26, the village saw the tracks of enemy tanks tumbling down. It was the time when Moscow thought to encircle kyiv and, like Boutcha, Irpin or Hostomel, Nove Zalissia is on the road. Young soldiers quickly criss-crossed the village on stolen bicycles and scooters, between the low houses and their vegetable gardens lined up along straight paths, today strewn with cherry blossoms and poppies, yesterday snowy or muddy.
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