Cultural and Spiritual Heritage in the Chernobyl Affected Areas

2021-04-22

One of the most terrible man-made disasters of the twentieth century the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant took place on April 26, 1986. The tragedy affected not only the fate of people, but also many places turned into black holes on the map of Belarus. Before the accident, there were 1283 historical monuments and 97 architectural monuments in the resettled territory. 

In the 1990s, state expeditions to study cultural heritage in the exclusion zone were organized in Belarus. As a result, about two thousand items of material culture were saved. Now these things are kept in the department of ancient Belarusian culture, research of Belarusian culture, language and literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and constitute a separate “Chernobyl collection”.

Also, the Chernobyl disaster had an irreparable impact on the intangible legacy. In 2015, the participants of the project “Belarusian Archive of Oral History” (http://www.nashapamiac.org/cachesearch?id=2&page=6) collected a collection of oral recollections of people whose lives were changed by Chernobyl. The entire collection is available on the archive website.