Three Memory Frameworks on Chernobyl

This case study explores three narratives – and attendant spatial manifestations – that, after emerging in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, foreground different aspects of the disaster’s legacy: the “hazard” story, the “national martyrdom” story, and the “lost paradise” story. Each of these narratives manifests itself spatially, from the iconic site of the power plant with the nearby ghost town of Pripyat, now the epicentre of an international disaster tourism industry, to Kyiv’s Chernobyl Museum and the related lieux de memoire that perpetuate national storytelling. The “paradise lost” narrative finds its spatial manifestation in the colourful cemeteries that stud the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Ethnographic analysis shows that as the ruins of former settlements become engulfed in vegetation, Chernobyl survivors keep returning to their ancestral burial grounds to carry out maintenance and perform rituals, thereby giving life to places of the dead and turning a landscape of loss into one of remembrance and hope.