The ones who came back

Samosely, in Ukrainian, means those who settled by themselves. It is the name that stuck to a group of people who in 1986 were put on buses, taken away from their homes, and who, some months or some years later, went back. They were sent away a second time, they returned again, and at some point the government made its peace with it and left them alone.

The first time I went into the exclusion zone, in 2012, I did not meet the samosely. I was on a one-day tour, out of Kyiv in the morning and back in the evening, and that kind of visit takes you where it takes everyone: Pripyat, the swimming pool, the fairground, the gas masks on the floor of a school.

The February 2014 trip came about for this too: to go and photograph the people you do not meet on a tour. I photographed about ten of them, scattered across different villages. Almost all of them had an animal in the house, dogs or cats, and one woman kept hens.

I think they do not see the radiation as a real risk; perhaps, not seeing it and not really knowing what it was, they were less afraid of it. For them the risk was another one: ending up in a flat in an unfamiliar city, among unfamiliar people, far from their own home.

A woman offered us pickled mushrooms she had gathered in the woods around the house. We said no.

That jar says something that goes well beyond the exclusion zone. Mushrooms take up caesium-137 more than other food does, and in Ticino the residual radioactivity is still about 40% of what was measured in 1986. The most contaminated are the underground ones, the deer truffles, which grow some ten centimetres down: wild boar feed on them, and that is why the wild boar is the sentinel species for environmental radioactivity. Since 2017 the limit for foodstuffs has been 600 becquerels per kilo, lowered from 1250, and every year between 2 and 5% of the wild boar shot in Ticino is seized for going over it; in 2015 one animal reached 9900 becquerels per kilo. In the 2014 hunting season, the year of my trip, ten animals out of 340 were seized. Edible woodland mushrooms have been analysed since 1986 as well: 791 samples in Ticino, today nearly all at background levels. They are measured by the Cantonal Laboratory, one of the seven national centres of competence for radioactivity.

116,000 people were evacuated from the zone in 1986; about 1200 came back. The last official count, in 2007, found 314 of them; in 2012 they were 197, in 2017 one hundred and thirty-five. Average age sixty-three, most of them women. These are numbers that can only go down: nobody becomes a samosely, you can only have been one already.

Sources on radioactivity in Ticino: Federal Office of Public Health, Cantonal Veterinary Office, RSI.