Mythogeography
Mythogeography
by Markiyan Kamysh
It has been fifteen years since my first pilgrimages into the Chornobyl Zone, and nostalgia has been set in motion. It is no accident that after just such a span of time this feeling turns vintage: a sweet ache for 1980s Miami erupts into sight and sound in an ocean of synthwave, and Home Alone — originally a Christmas film — becomes a New Year’s staple for children of the nineties.
I deliberately choose to give in to it, and when the comet Nostalgia appears, I climb onto its tail and look back at the age of geographical discoveries of my youth.
Where the Zone’s great bodies of water once stood, there is now a dense forest. The swamps beneath the power lines were born, spread, and vanished; colorful frescoes peeled away from the walls, and whole constellations of villages were consumed by fire. Slender concrete bridges turned into slanting lines of war ruin, cutting off the left bank of the Pripyat and making it, as in the early 2010s, isolated.
The time loop closed, and there was enough rhyme to go around. They are like maps of transoceanic submarine cables: they resemble the routes of Zheng He’s expeditions and the colonization of the New World — different, yet sprouting out of one another, making visible the transformations and the flow of one into the other.
What was the Zone for me then? At the end of the noughties, when my personal travels consisted of childhood trips to Crimea and a couple of student booze-raids on Lviv? What else could it have been, when my sense of the world was limited to the rural places of childhood and two Kyiv neighborhoods?
Back then the Zone was the all-mightiness of Everything, not scraps of a forgotten world, which humanity has been combing over with fieldwork since the discovery of Antarctica, but a giant carcass stretched out before me, painted in stars and night, like terra incognita in Heroes of Might and Magic III. It was what today’s world of half-measures and halfway solutions lacks so badly: it was everything at once.
Reports of illegal pilgrimage online in the late noughties were, for me, the catalyst, the arrow of Cupid, and the divine foreboding of the New World. I will not assess their literary level, but in terms of Heyerdahlism, together with the good photos, they became the diaries of Cortés, hinting to me at the existence of an entire continent right under my nose. If the pre-accident and liquidator history was familiar to me, the absolute emptiness surrounding what the Zone was “back then” was filled exclusively by these reports, for which there simply were no alternatives. Brief as they were, and now no longer to be found online, they were the quintessence of everything we expected from the Zone — a teaser for a mysterious country of abandonment and something we dreamed of finding while rummaging through grandparents’ attic shelves and burrowing into the derelicts of childhood.
The richness of the Zone, like the Incas valley of the abandoned, was striking: the radioactive equipment dump “Rassokha” was then still an uncut labyrinth of APCs and fire engines, while sun-drenched, mighty helicopters were fleeing beyond the horizon, promising even more abandonment, so countless and so boundless were they. The site’s promise and exemplary nature from the very beginning hinted only at the accumulation of wonders as one moved toward the heart of darkness, the heart of the forgotten.
Moving deeper into the forest crystallized solitude; an overnight stay in an abandoned village brought a frightening encounter with a moose, and the empty road seemed endless: a narrow, cracked gray ribbon squeezed by the explosions of luxuriant acacias on both sides and pressed down by generous sunbeams from above. The apt sequence of photographs completed the fairy tale, and suddenly I felt like a fly whose only purpose is to fly into this light. These photos are the first rays of a new world: like the widely popular in Europe sixteenth-century landscape of Tenochtitlan and The Blue Marble—significant imprints of an era and powerful teasers at once.
The first time I saw the photograph of the “Chornobyl-2” radar station, it made the place even more ungraspable, because what else can this mysterious valley conceal if it greets you with an endless labyrinth of helicopters, an archipelago of abandoned villages, and now this unimaginable structure as well—more majestic than the pyramids, and that is not even to mention Pripyat, which the author of the report had not yet reached.
The image of the abandoned railway track in the thick mist of golden autumn was etched into me forever: two little trees leaned over the gaping liquidator gates into the “inner” Zone. And before them, on the track, in the dense mist, there was an illegal Chornobyl piligrim —the discoverer of our time. I myself still saw these gates, but by the middle of the 2010s nothing was left of them, just as nothing remained of the other markers of the Zone’s life: wrinkles by whose depth I measured the degrees of loss.
It was a photograph of Pripyat, drowned in the deep violets of dawn and caught from the window of a high-rise, that made me fall in love with the Zone. On the windowsill a pair of binoculars—such an apt detail: a hint of distance, and getting to the edge of the megacity is by no means simple. The city map had not yet been loaded into my head, and it seemed to be ten times larger than it actually was, and that “somewhere there, around the corner” from the central square there were another ten such squares, and to run them all on foot would surely take more than a day. At first I deliberately described the photo from memory in order to convey the cast of impressions in broad strokes, and only then, for the first time in fifteen years, to look at the original and examine how memory had altered the standard, cut away the superfluous, and left a vivid cast of the myth. And now I have found the original… and in fact there were two photos.
From two sources memory melted one, condensing it into the stock phrases “dense violets of night,” “a panorama of Pripyat,” “binoculars as a little key to a promising labyrinth.” At the same time, the imagined-desired space expanded many times over; it is in general inclined to endless expansion, like the Universe after the Big Bang. I now think that this tendency of imagination to expand an uncartographed, adored space once pushed me to write the novella, where I expanded the Zone many times over.
Pripyat in these photographs is absolutely empty, but in it you fear the unknown and barricade yourself in for the night, carefully warming supper on a meager spirit stove. The pretentious violets of dawn in the cautious photographs from above multiply the vessel of a thousand secrets, which still have yet to be drawn onto the inner map.
It was not the official visits by transport, but the illegal pilgrim reports from the late 2000s that played a key role, because they proposed the true method of knowing. For it was precisely this method that made it possible to feel the Zone as uninhabited, unknown, boundless, brighter than anything we could then imagine.
***
As I mastered the Zone, my personal mythical map took shape, more like a medieval pilgrimage map than a detailed Soviet military topographic map. After a couple of years of active wandering, I divided the Zone into notional regions—“Great Forest,” “Left Bank,” “Archipelago of abandoned forestry posts”—and gave them names in the way locals named the land before the nuclear accident. However, I did this independently.
For example, the mythical region “Great Forest,” known among ecologists as the Ilyinsky hydrological reserve, is a square of remote forest twenty by twenty kilometers. In the middle of the twentieth century locals called it “Black Forest” I in the 2010s—“Great Forest,” and other pilgrims—the chthonic “Dark Forest,” quite tendentiously, considering the village called “Thick Forest” nearby. All variations of Tolkien’s Mirkwood on our little fantasy map.
“Great Forest" was, so to speak, a zone within the Zone for those who had already covered the rest of the Zone. Just as uninhabited and chthonic in relation to the rest of the Zone as the Zone is in relation to “mainland” Ukraine. “Great Forest" was part of a broader mythoregion—the “Western Zone,” characterized by a special wreckage of abandoned villages, bogginess, and overgrowth by jungle. It does not matter that in some places the situation could differ significantly: these attributes, observed in certain spots, were automatically projected onto the whole region.
Around the abandoned railway track everything “teemed” with wolves, pontoons over the rivers “sank into the fog,” and the two surviving houses in the nearby village had sunk so deeply into the bog that they “turned onto their sides” and over the years continued to descend into the mire, like a local Leaning Tower of Pisa. “In reality” everything is exaggerated, but when it comes to mythogeography, who is interested in “reality”? The houses simply had to turn onto their sides, because this is the realization of the Polesian myth of the swamp, the “двиг,” that is, the earth that “separates” in different directions and from the abyss into the Otherworld insects and reptiles penetrate into the world of humans.
Rivers functioned as rubicons, both when I was taking my first steps and before the invasion: it was the river that felt like the “entrance” to the Zone, not the barbed-wire fence. If the division into the “thirty-kilometer zone” and the “ten-kilometer zone” arose from the intensity of contamination, then my “outer Zone” was everything I had walked on foot up to the river. If one entered the Zone where no river had to be forded, the necessity of a rubicon did not disappear: in that role, if there was no wire, an abandoned railway station, a pontoon bridge, a little rail bridge, and so on, would be chosen. A notable man-made detail—an obvious analogy with milestones. And the width of the river does not matter at all—psychologically, the rubicon begins where one has to take off one’s shoes in order to cross it by wading.
Later I plunged into linguistic studies and found out that even small rivers in Polesia became dialect boundaries.
The tiny Veresnia is a wonderful example. For me the Zone began right here, not at the wire. An overnight stay in the village nearby was accompanied by a walk through a field of night mist and wet grass toward the water: a long row of poplars under a starry sky, a striped black-and-white edging across the bridge, and the water—fresh and cold to the point of cramps.
And so, according to studies of pre-accident dialects, south of the Veresnia River the consonant “l” before vowels suddenly softens, as though Veresnia’s icy water were softening the consonants themselves.
Such changes along the line of the river testify not only to the features of speech, but also allow researchers to suppose that Veresnia was once the boundary of the spread of the tribes. And this goes through me down to the spinal cord, because from the south I approached the bank dozens of times at night, ready to plunge in, and remembered the Greek legend that this was the water of the river of the dead before stepping into their kingdom.
And I did plunge in.
It is paradoxical that the principle that a river is a barrier only when you have to take off your shoes to ford it does not apply at all to thousands of man-made canals, as though my soul, after years of wandering through swamps, had intertwined itself with natural hydrological systems and refused even to acknowledge man-made metastases.
My soul still moves by the old, abundant, riverine inner maps, reckons major natural barriers by them, segments space, and tells me where to catch my breath, summing up the ground covered.
***
In the autumn of 2013, I felt irreversible changes. The pressure of the swarm of pilgrims grew stronger, and I hid in the most remote corners simply to escape that influx. The Zone was changing: from a fifteenth-century America into scattered specks of Machu Picchu a hundred years earlier, and into the people who lived on its overgrown ruins and were deeply displeased with the visit of the “discoverers,” complaining that they would bring their forgotten paradise back into the orbit of governments and states: duties, services, and obligations.
The most vivid symbol of the Zone’s state was not even the frescoes whose flaking I had photographed for years, but an abandoned bus with the eloquent inscription “Chornobyl PARADISE.” It stood among the ruins of a collective farm in the heart of the wasteland, and at the height of summer 2011 I found shelter there. Not a speck of dust, not an inscription. Bees had nested in the body of the bus, and the buzzing of thousands of them soothed more deeply than the Pripyat sun and the humming in the dome of their sisters’ abandoned church.
Year after year my route passed through this place, and I became a witness to its decline, until after about five years I was horrified by the amount of trash and the inscriptions, the most eloquent of which called the place “the leaky glory hole.” The “same” Zone went into convulsions in the age of the dismantling of “Rassokha,” the removal of the old Chornobyl pipe, the drying out of the cooling pond, the approach of the new sarcophagus, but clinical death arrived when the bus “Chornobyl PARADISE” turned into “the leaky glory hole.”
The pulse stopped. The bees’ buzzing fell silent. Only the pandemic returned the Zone to truth.
The joking inscriptions “Covid-19” on the hermetic doors of abandoned hangars acquired new meanings, and on the eve of the invasion I remembered the Zone as it had first appeared: full of sun and silence, an ocean of quiet, with no people.
***
I stand far from the Zone and, in thought, spread out my inner pilgrim’s map on the rocks.
I choose the element long and carefully before adding it: to expand, with precision, the mythogeography of the place to which one will return again. My boundless Polesian Moana lacks a teasing marker on the far border, a moss-grown ancient statue lost in the jungle at the edge of the oikoumene. A promising element at the epicenter of the ocean of swamp, something that would push one to plunge even deeper into it.
There are enough Soviet monuments to the unknown soldier in the Zone, but they belong to the same era as the rest of the ruins. There are also tales of Stalin busts sunk in the bog: as a precaution, should the leader somehow rise again, they could be quickly hauled back out—yet again, all of this is about the day before yesterday. But the ruins deeper in the Polesian thickets ought to become ever older, illustrating the Conradian journey into the past: railway crossings, pontoon bridges, and bus stops, as one sinks deeper into the borderland, must give way to Mayan pyramids and mighty toppled statues on whose fragments jaguars sleep.
And among the most astonishing statues of the Age of Discovery there is my favorite, which I now mentally move into the Ilyinsky hydrological reserve: the mysterious monument of a horseman found in the Azores, in the very heart of the Atlantic, in 1432, some 1,500 kilometers from the European shore. A monument pointing west, as though hinting at everything awaiting the Portuguese ahead, while at the same time symbolizing the edge of the world.
The chronicles of the mid-sixteenth century preserved the description of the monument:
“A stone statue stands on a slab, a man on a bone horse, a man dressed in a rain cloak, without a hat, his left hand resting on the horse’s mane, and his right hand outstretched, the fingers clenched except for the second finger, known in Latin as the index finger, pointing west.”
And another description, more interesting:
“The figure of a large stone man standing on a slab or support, and on the stone some letters are carved, and some say that his hand pointed north-northeast or northeast, as if indicating the great coast of Terra dos Bacalhaus (M.K. — Newfoundland). Others say that with two outstretched fingers he pointed southwest, as though indicating the Indias de Castela (M.K. — the Antilles) and the great coast of America, and on the three other fingers he had folded there were some letters: Chaldean, Hebrew, or Greek, or of some other nation, in a language no one could read; and the local people, together with one man from the island of Flores, said that it was Jesus. In their opinion, the authors were the Carthaginians, because they traveled here… and, returning from the Antilles, left this stone monument with letters as marks and signs of what they had discovered there.”
The question of the statue’s origin remains open, and it is unclear what this bright flash is, more interesting than most of the conspiracy theorizing that tries to saddle the globe with an owl-shaped mass of “evidence” for supposedly pre-Columbian contacts found in the New World. But this story is not about hypothetical contacts; it is about a hint of the galaxy of the undiscovered, the rebirth of the Pillars of Hercules, their shifting westward to the borders of the oikoumene of that time. A move away from an abstract perception of the Pillars as rocks or a strait, and a return to their original state as a concrete physical object in a concrete Phoenician temple. From there, according to Strabo, the name “Pillars” may also have come: “According to others, the Pillars are bronze columns eight cubits high in the sanctuary of Heracles in Gades (M.K. — modern Cádiz, Spain, on the Atlantic coast), on which is inscribed an account of the cost of building the sanctuary. Having visited the temple with these Pillars at the end of the voyage and offered sacrifice to Heracles, seafarers would begin to spread the tale, one outbidding another, that here was the end of land and sea.”
There is a theory that the Azores statue depicted the Carthaginian sun god Baal Hammon. Punic presence on the archipelago has been proven, and their gods were often depicted on horseback, especially this one. Yet since this is my mythogeography of the Zone, I will reject the version with the bloodthirsty god of sacrifice, because the story of the statue is first and foremost about a fragment of the Golden Age, an ancient mixture of Zheng He and Henry the Navigator, a hint that we do not know everything about the Phoenician Columbus Hanno. This story is a teaser of teasers, the most promising gesture in the history of the great geographical discoveries. An invitation to sink even deeper into the ocean of forest, where there is nothing left but rusty pontoon bridges and the ruins of forestry stations in the deep swamp.
Set on an inaccessible cliff, at the very western edge of the Azorean outpost, the statue stood there for another half century after its “discovery,” until it did in fact arouse the interest of King Manuel I of Portugal, who ordered his court painter to sail to the islands and make a sketch; and, seeing that sketch, he ordered the statue transported to his palace, during which it broke, and the fragments lay there for some time.
In general, researchers do not question the statue’s existence and are not inclined to regard the story as a legend invented to legitimize territorial claims or subsequent expansion, given the authority of written sources, the discovery of Punic coin hoards, and the rest of the pre-Portuguese artifacts in the Azores.
There are also surviving chronicles that mention the inscription beneath the statue:
“I heard from the locals that on the rock, below the statue, some letters were engraved; and since it was dangerous to reach the place of the inscription, some men were sent down, well tied with ropes, and they cast the letters that time had not yet erased into some wax taken specially for this purpose; however, the cast letters were already worn down, almost formless, and therefore, or perhaps because the assistants knew only Latin, and that imperfectly, none of those present on the spot was able to understand what these letters meant.”
This statue vanished forever, and where it once stood there is now only stone, and a soft, salty wind pierces straight through, feeding one with ocean, after which, from the unfamiliar freshness, the head aches for a long time. Where I set the statue, the wind comes only rarely; frost-bitten yellow grass crunches underfoot, and in the abandoned forestry towers one finds bird nests in precisely the same places, exactly there. From those towers nothing is visible to the north, not even on a clear, frosty day. Nothing but forest.
A moss-covered statue is a classic element of the European myth, even more important than swords stuck in stone. Yet one can hardly hope to find anything like that in Ukrainian Polesia, given the extreme primitiveness of the early Slavic idols.
To suppose, even hypothetically, the existence somewhere deep in our bogs of a stone (sic!) idol with at least some signs of Hellenic influence, one would have to make a series of very bold assumptions and turn not to the early Slavic period, but to the Geloni and Budini, all those Polesian nut-munching nomads from the left bank of the Dnipro, where together with them lived a small handful of Greek colonists from the Northern Black Sea region, in whose fortified settlements Herodotus described Hellenized wooden idols:
“In their territory a wooden city has been built; the name of this city is Gelon. There are temples of the Greek gods there, decorated in Greek fashion with wooden statues. And every three years they hold festivals in honor of Dionysus and fall into Bacchic frenzy. For the Geloni of old are Greeks who left the harbors and settled among the Budini. And they speak a language partly Scythian, partly Greek.”
One can imagine a stone statue, invent the conditions for its transfer from the Left Bank to Kyiv Polesia from some emporium of Greek merchants in a barbarian fortified settlement… but the journey north from Kyiv, even without a statue, contains the powerful core of the Conradian journey into the past, incredible in its visual force: of course, this is the increasing number of Proto-Slavic archaisms in the dialects of the Kyiv region as one approaches Polesia, toward Belarus.
***
If the addition of a statue from the edge of the Roman oikoumene symbolizes the edge of the world, I now turn to an object that really did exist somewhere on the outskirts of the modern Zone.
I mean the legendary stone chapel that appears in the local medieval chronicles under the beautiful name Davidova Bozhenka.
This matters for the swampy Amazon of Chornobyl Polesia, because a thousand years ago a stone structure deep in this wild backwoods was pure surrealism, a piece of civilization cast out of Kyiv and dropped into the jungle, like Pripyat’s futuristic district, where there were no asphalt roads until the 1960s, and the Nazis, merely by looking at the map, were so alarmed by the impassability of the Pripyat swamps that when they invaded the Soviet Union they decided to split the army in two. Some believe that this was not the last decision that predetermined the outcome of the war.
One medieval chronicle mentions the phrase “crossing the Dnipro at Bozhenka and went with the troops toward Kyiv,” where the name functions as a stable geographical landmark. It is tempting to believe this means the chapel was made of stone, and that this is a juicy story about a mythic Kievan Rus’ stone church lost in the Zone, but the chances of that are minuscule: only dozens of stone churches were built across the whole country then. There were many churches in the Zone, but in the villages they were almost everywhere wooden, and they burned for centuries, and folk memory no longer preserves tales about village stone churches in the Polesian wild bogs.
But since what concerns me here is the Zone as a topos, the central place of the whole world, where meanings unfold and which may correspond to fragments of real space, then of course the chapel will be stone, quite large, even a cross-domed church with one proper Old Rus’ dome.
Some place this mythical chapel in the village where the Pripyat flows into the Dnipro: a place of power that once drew fishermen from all over the country, because the Pripyat winds through abandoned places and its waters carry plenty of fish. A sacral spot: floating fishing bars, old barges marooned in the wilderness, legends of medieval border checkpoints, and the fact that Soviet troops established the first bridgehead in the crossing of the Dnipro here… This tiny borderland patch is pumped full to the brim with the sacred spirit of history.
Some believe that the chapel is now flooded by the waters of the Kyiv Sea, and such a version of events rhymes beautifully. Here the story of the flood is not even confined to Christian frameworks, but is a shared motif across the world, a plot widespread from Polynesia to Alaska and China: an ancient advance of the waters. And all of this sits beautifully beside the chthonic nature of Polesia as the archetypal cradle of Slavic ethnogenesis, not to mention water as the kingdom of death in Polesian ideas of the afterlife.
Now there is not a trace of it left. Time’s wind carried it away, and the remains of the ruins were swallowed by the waters of the Kyiv Reservoir. No one knows exactly where it stood, only that it was somewhere within the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. A stone chapel, a medieval ghost, a mythic layer onto which the ghost city of Pripyat was laid, along with the ghosts of two wars. There are so many ghosts that they could fill the stands of the abandoned Pripyat stadium just to watch the forest growing on it grow even taller.
This ghost-chapel fits perfectly into a Polesian legend about a church that sank into the bog, whose bells a lone wanderer suddenly hears at night in the forest, from beneath the water. Or about a church into which a traveler accidentally walks after dark and joins the all-night service, only to notice the strange language in which the “priest” is conducting the liturgy, and the uncanny valley that gives them away: all of the “flock” have dirty hands, because they were clawing at the earth as they climbed out of it…
***
The addition and expansion of my inner pilgrim map is in no way a reaction to the loss of the real Zone.
I already mentioned above the image from deep within its jungles: “A jaguar warming itself on a moss-grown ancient statue.” I mentioned it for good reason, because besides the aptness of the image as a poetic element, there are ample historical grounds for adding big cats to the Moana. In Polesian mythology I have encountered not even a hint of anything similar. Still, a lion, a cheetah, or even a Caspian tiger could theoretically have strayed there once.
Researchers are almost unanimous in the opinion that the chronicled “fierce beast” that attacked Volodymyr Monomakh during a hunt was a lion, and not an imported one or an escapee from a princely menagerie, but specifically a European lion from the wild, now extinct. All this started with Monomakh’s testimony in his famous text, where he tells how badly life had beaten him, how bears had torn him, elk had trampled him, and how “…a fierce beast jumped onto my thighs and overturned the horse with me.”
All things considered, the “fierce beast” was indeed a European lion and gave the glorious prince a very solid beating. Of course, it is unclear how a steppe lion could have reached as far as Kyiv Polesia… At best, some believe Monomakh’s encounter with the “fierce beast” took place on the left bank of the Dnipro River.
It has also been suggested that the attack on Monomakh may have been made by the now-extinct Caspian tiger. Given that it once roamed the territory of present-day Georgia and is known to cover hundreds of kilometers, such a meeting, purely hypothetically, is not impossible. It is a very tasty fit for Polesian mythogeography, because for a long time it itself hovered on the brink of extinction, and the chase after the “last Caspian tiger” in the second half of the twentieth century, with its half-mystical photographs, is reminiscent of the feverish search for the Tasmanian tiger in The Hunter (2011). Given the relic nature of the Caspian tiger, I very much want to put precisely it into the Swampy Moana, rather than the more ordinary lion. Not least because of the scene from Apocalypse Now. Though the lion too is an African, that is, deeply Conradian fauna, not to mention the spotted cheetah, which recalls the jaguars of Amazonia.
The cheetah, though, was a common beast in Kyivan Rus’ and was probably perceived much as today’s flashy sports cars are by the newly rich. Frescoes in Saint Sophia of Kyiv clearly depict princely hunts with cheetahs, and the presence of stable comparisons in Old Rus’ chroniclers, in particular “walking lightly, like a cheetah,” indirectly testifies to a good familiarity with these animals: stable comparisons usually arise on the basis of already known concepts, objects, and phenomena.
Cheetahs in the Zone fit visually too, because they came here from America across the Bering ice "bridge"—that is, yet another very tasty piece of the Mesoamerican world (and a relic as well, having passed through the population “bottleneck”), which is incredibly close to my mythomap. A cheetah like that could easily have broken away from a princely hunt and climbed onto a fallen statue to bask in the sun.
With its hunting method and emphasis on speed, the jungle does not suit it. And cheetahs are simply the symbol of the domestication process, while the jungle is a completely alien biome for them, whereas lions and Caspian tigers are classic relics. And the tiger wins, because the lion is a creature of the savanna and moreover a pride animal, while the range of the Caspian tiger once included Asian jungles and a habit of walking hundreds of kilometers, so this feline, if it wandered into the Polesia of my Moana, could theoretically survive there and hunt successfully.
And, most importantly, all of this is a story about relics, remains, the last of the Mohicans, a story turned back into the past, because Polesia itself is always turned into the past, because that is its method and its greatest value at the same time.
What else I like about our relics is their groundedness and proximity to reality. If the Loch Ness legends are something like dark-souls with baroque flourishes, then our most relicish relic (apart, of course, from the Goths of Theodoro) here in Ukraine is the stern realism of Kingdom Come: Deliverance—unhyperbolized gray reality.
But what I enjoy is not the “possibility of relics” itself, because that is just Heyerdahlism in its banal form; what interests me are the triggers and the mechanism that set off the exciting desire to plunge into the unknown, to conquer like a conquistador and Heyerdahl it, and what imaginary worlds this gives birth to, and how these emotions evolve, what deforms them, and how one even works with this clay?
“Lyut” ("fierce beast") is a wonderful Medival name for a lion, like the Stark direwolf or Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh, whom the hero-friends Gilgamesh and Enkidu went after in battle (“to go hunt Humbaba together” sounds almost as cool as hunting down the Meph boss in Diablo II during the early-2000s PC LAN-party era—an experience that stays with you for life), and Lyut, with his thoroughly beaten Monomakh, is in a sense our local Loch Ness, only everyone is already sick to death of the Nessie story, it is not worth the shell of an egg, because there exists my favorite, again from the Conradian jungles of the Congo basin, the mysterious monster Mokele-mbembe. This is one of the most interesting legends about relic sauropods, that is, dinosaurs that “survived” in impenetrable jungles.
The story became popular in the final stage of the myths about Africa, exactly around the time when the failed Columbus Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon wilderness. Around the time it became clear that in the African interior there were no advanced civilizations, but rather the problems of colonial exploitation. But a vacant holy place, terra incognita, is never left empty, so a mania for searching for dinosaurs began, because it was believed that the jungles of Africa preserved relic flora and fauna.
That a holy place of terra incognita is never empty is not just a pretty phrase: look at how, once the whole globe was opened, Lovecraft pushed the terrible myths of the unknown land all the way to Antarctica and then immediately farther out into space, because mystery must remain elusive, ungraspable. Myths about Nazis in Antarctica, on the dark side of the Moon, the films Alien and The Thing—these are precisely illustrations of the process by which the unknown is pushed farther away to the oikoumene’s edge as what had previously been considered unknown is gradually explored.
And here I come to the point that the addition and expansion of my inner pilgrim map is in no way a reaction to the loss of the real Zone; this impulse has nothing to do with hypercompensation. It grows out of a more basic property of human imagination when we speak of explored and unexplored space: the necessity of expansion.
In fact, from this grows my deep desire to expand the pilgrim map of the Zone. Hence the search for the statue in the Azores, hinting at the ocean of the undiscovered, and its transfer into the Polesian wilderness. Hence the desire to expand the Zone in one of my novellas; I call this the “tendency of imagination-and-memory to expand the uncharted, adored space.”
Returning to Mokele-mbembe.
This belongs to that late period when the last antique mythogeographic legend about the Nile flowing out of a magical mountain had already been dispelled by all those Stanley and Livingstone figures wandering about there, trying to find at least something in order to join the Pizarro-Cortés club. And that pleasantly reminds me of the Zone of the early 2010s, when the main body was already opened and I hunted the last scraps of the undiscovered in the deepest Polesian swampy areas.
So Mokele-mbembe is the last shreds of African, Congolese terra incognita, Conradian Loch Ness in the literal sense. The monster is described a little differently by the local tribes, but very close to Nessie and very much like a dinosaur-sauropod, the one with the long neck. It is clear that stories about Mesozoic relics are not true, but the stories themselves are worth attention, because they may turn out to be a deformed and hyperbolized myth about rhinoceroses, for example, which once lived where the legends of Mbembe circulate, and then simply died out. Something like a mixture of giraffe and hippopotamus, a sort of African analogue of the basilisk and other hybrids from Byzantine medieval histories of beliefs and monsters from The Witcher 3, interesting precisely because it is fixed at the embryonic stage of mythmaking.
There is, of course, no evidence for the existence of the “monster” except for a mass of folkloric testimonies and a pile of natives who were shown dozens of dinosaur drawings and photos of various animals, and all the natives without hesitation pointed to the sauropod.
And if the Eskimo legend about a relic encounter (the gist being: one tribe long ago accidentally found beneath the snow the frozen carcass of a shaggy monster with tusks and ate it for a very long time) raises no doubts at all as to authenticity, given the coexistence in time of the pyramids and the last dwarf mammoths of Siberia, then the survival of relic nano-populations of dinosaurs in African tropics over tens of millions of years sounds like nonsense, absurdity, but what I am speaking about is something else entirely.
The degree of “wonderful relics of the past” in African history is incomparably greater than our “only” Caspian tiger and European lion; still, the half-tones are exactly what is needed.
For my inner map, the Caspian tiger suits just perfectly. A bridge between Polesia and Conradian jungle. A tribute to that tiger scene from Apocalypse Now.
***
The great feline exotica on my pilgrim map are arranged precisely at the corners of a square, like the four Trees of Life holding up the sky on Aztec maps, or the monsters on European maps—animist variants of the ancient Atlantes.
But the central feline cult, of course, must remain the local lynx, which even now symbolizes the furthest outposts of Polesia and the Chornobyl Zone; and medieval notions of the lynx’s ferocity, which became a symbol and heraldic motif, partly overlap with New World notions of jaguars—an archetypal image of the unconscious, aggression, and war. “To be a jaguar” meant to act in accordance with the image. In this it is close to the European image of the alpha male lion. By the way, the first ship that brought black slaves to Virginia was called The White Lion and meant roughly the same thing as “to be a jaguar,” only with a shade of racial superiority.
A phrase something like “the jaguar’s mat” (meaning a seat cushion) signified “seat of authority in Maya council.” The degree to which aggression had become fused with the image of the jaguar is eloquently shown by the fact that the very word “jaguar” became the root of words denoting aggression, valor, bravery. The same applies to the Mayan set phrase “to be like a jaguar” and “to hunt like a jaguar.”
The very concept of Maya warfare was designated by the astonishing phrase “spreading the jaguar skin.” In my Mythopolissia this will sound like “to throw a lynx skin over the earth disk” or “to wrap the terrestrial sphere in the skin of a lyut.”
Jaguars, as an American endemic species, and the complex of Amazonian beliefs can be mined and extrapolated if I decide to develop the myth of the lynx further into Polesian mythogeography. To imagine that there were no nineteenth-century expeditions of the Russian Empire in the swamps, no Soviet land-reclamation campaigns, no industrialization and no incursion of nuclear infrastructure, and that instead there were some Neuri androphagi tribes from Herodotus’ History and a significantly larger lynx population living alongside them in a hyperbolized Polesian Archipelago of Swamp, of isolated absoluteness, one that had reached the Amazonian nirvana of jungles, the depth of their ecstasy.
Polesia still “preserves” archaic Proto-Slavic lexical and customary forms, but the most interesting thing is how and where the isolated swamp-archipelago landscape has shaped ideas about the world, cosmology, and myths.
To trace the motifs of shapeshifting in our biome, one needs a comparative analysis of Polesian wolf motifs, the Amazonian jaguar-shaman, and a body of African shapeshifter lore from the Sudd region and the Congo basin, in order to grasp, even in broad terms, how cultures rooted in swamps and jungles conceptualize the boundary between human and animal.
At first glance, the common features of the mythologies of these three regions are the same everywhere: the same emphasis on river spirits and mythic beings of the freshwater realm. In Polesia, what is interesting is the unfinished nature of ideas about the “water spirit,” an abstraction that researchers recognize as precisely that Polesian archaism™: very early, relic Slavic notions preserved thanks to the isolation of the Polesian bogs and the Amazon-jungle effect; structural analogues in the mythologies of Central European peoples appear in a later form, literally overgrown with details and given shape.
But not only beings… how does the bog influence cosmology, ideas about, for instance, the starry sky, and myths of world creation? What myths associated with the bog arose and took shape in other regions, but not in Polesia? Here it is simpler: the reflection of the sky in water found echoes in various mythologies of the world. This leads to the idea of a “second sky,” of “two skies,” and, by analogy, of a “heavenly bog.” And, for example, to a creation myth in which the Polesian Abzu and Tiamat wandered forever through cosmic marshes, leaping from one islet to another, and in them a love story developed that gave birth to our world: the division of the primeval bog into celestial and earthly bogs. In reality, the connection between marshland and sky in Polesia is much weaker, but the idea that stars are the souls of the dead is nevertheless attested.
The myths of the peoples of the African bog of the Sudd gave rise to a magnificent variant of the world-creation plot: the separation of earth and sky caused by reeds that grew wildly in the primordial bog until they began to support the sky and separate it from the earth. From here we get the perfect “primeval bog,” which migrates to the pilgrim map.
In my Mythopolissia the obvious candidate for the plant that separated earth and sky in the primeval bog is the broadleaf cattail, with those brown, heavy seed heads on top, which Poleshuks sometimes call “kachalky” (literally, “seed heads”).
In everyday speech, free of botanical terms, this plant is simply called a reed—or kamysh, as in my pen name. It symbolizes the passage between water and dry land, and in general it is an important plant: people used to try to eat it and apply it to wounds. “The reed is so tall that it holds up the sky.” That is not a bad phrase to begin with. Reeds as the prototype of Atlantes, Aztec Trees of Life, and the monsters of medieval cartography: everything that held up the sky in later versions of world order.
And returning to cats in order to enrich the image of the lynx, we find an apt motif among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas: abundant tales of the “underwater panther” (sometimes even called “The Great Lynx”), which in different versions was blended into a hybrid, including with a snake. The lynx motif is in general strong in the mythology of Native North Americans, but what interests me are precisely the plots connected with the spirits of the watery realm. And so the underwater panther is a mighty, or even the mightiest, mythic being, living at the very bottom of bodies of water.
The majestic Lynx is the perfect fit, because the motifs of water and snakes are exactly what Polesia also possesses, so I take the “underwater panther” onto the pilgrim map, together with Davidova Bozhenka, the Caspian tiger, and the Azorean statue of Baal Hammon.
So, how will our first myth sound? Let’s say:
“The divine Abzu and Tiamat wandered forever through the primeval bog, and where they made love, there grew a reed so tall that it propped up the sky, dividing the bog into celestial and earthly bogs; that is why stars are now visible both underfoot and overhead. And we lived in peace and harmony in the Golden Age, until those arrived who spread the skin of the Great Lynx across the world, eager to wrap the terrestrial sphere in it.”
***
Since 2022, my perception of Polesia and the Zone has changed: it has been warped by the very fact of being densely mined. And “space” is not a two-dimensional spread of territory, but a transparent filler, a sunlit wax of silence, a map of impressions of relief and phenomena from which I assemble my mythogeography.
Once I had walked the entire Zone, I felt it in its entirety as well; I did not even need to close my eyes, and I could feel the changes, the deformations of the filler, as though someone were making a wax cast of the inscription on the pedestal of that Azorean statue—only in this case the letters can still be read, and words can still be composed from them. And these words are about unity, about awareness of belonging, about accepting oneself as an inseparable part of land and element, when it is not you who arrange the Zone inside yourself, but you who arrange yourself inside it. Even with mines.
Mines affect the air thickened by silence and sun terribly: they become microscopic white holes in the Polesian cosmos, littering space with their tiny gravitational anomalies, which do not work by the attraction of black holes, but by white repulsion. You know there are many mines there, and all at once, from different sides, they push at you until you go rigid, freezing even in an imaginary journey, not knowing where to place your foot.
The Zone is now an archipelago, but instead of swamps and water there are mines. Before the war, its space was unified, and from any point I felt the whole thing, as though looking at a vast, open meadow.
A lowland has risen into the sky and turned into a plateau, into a height from which you see everything and feel everything, even if “in reality” you stand in a bog, and above you hangs a birch forest or a pine forest, while you look through it and forget about it altogether, as about a heartbeat.
I do not know how I will return to my Pripyat home on Lesya Ukrainka Street No. ∞. That is another mythoregion. The only micro-mythoregion that imagination and memory single out in Pripyat. Yet the “jungles on Lesya” are harder to isolate than the “Dark Forest,” the “Railway,” or the “Archipelago of forestry posts,” because the city has been traversed millions of times, while imagination dozes in explored space.
That is precisely why the “jungles on Lesya” are formed: the development is dense and cloned, and in the dark without a flashlight one can even get lost, unexpectedly walking into the wrong building. At some point I noticed that I remember there not quite everything, as with the rest of the city, but about eighty percent—just enough for the effect of the last patches of terra incognita to kick in and for the process of completion, the conceptualization of space, and along with it hyperbole and jungle-growth, to begin: the massive cloning of Soviet nine-story blocks of the 121-60-25 series, their vegetative reproduction from tens to hundreds, to five hundred, to thousands.
The “jungles on Lesya” are the only place in Pripyat where I felt at least somewhat lost, even in the early 2020s. I carefully left this district not fully explored, but kept burrowing back into it in order to watch how the dark patches of terra incognita budded, swelled, grew, and gradually closed over me, opening into the unknown completely.
Returning to the Zone will be an invaluable experience: we await dizzying operations of imagination and memory upon a long-forgotten space. Lesya Ukrainka Street No. ∞, the final destination and at the same time eternity, in which we dissolve. In all its “I stood and listened to spring,” “To you, Ukraine, our unfortunate mother, my first string will sound. And the string will sound solemnly and quietly, and the song will pour forth from the heart” from the apartment on Lesya Ukrainka Street ∞, on Lesya Ukrainky Street Infinity.
***
The history of ruins is only just beginning, however much I might long to be the one to write its final note.
This is more than the mythogeography of Polesia’s ruins alone, because the material around us is eloquent, and descriptions of these ruins form the main thread binding this land together—from Plano Carpini’s testimony that after the Mongol invasion, from a medieval metropolis of tens of thousands, only two hundred houses remained around St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, all the way to the newsreel footage of the Chornobyl disaster, later pilgrim photographs of Pripyat, and panoramas of cities destroyed by war, which in the gray zones after the war will stand for a long time still, like the districts of Famagusta.
All of this is even more Polesia: the Phoenician statue migrates from the Azores into the wilderness, Monomakh’s lion points toward the inscription hic sunt leones. And the stone chapel in the heart of the bog draws us into the legendary era of great ruins; it does not so much activate Old Rus’ as become a thread in the labyrinth of time, an emotional rhyme to the later fascination with ruins in the testimonies of French engineers sent here, ecumenical patriarchs on their way north, and accidental Franciscan monks, who, describing the edge of bitter misery, were struck by the contrast of ruins so majestic and so ancient that it is almost impossible to grasp how they could have ended up in such a wilderness at all.
These memories, few though they are, are our Arthuriana: ruins of the ancient, larger than what came long afterward. Four hundred years ago the vault was still intact at Kyiv’s Golden Gate: a powerful symbol of antiquity, more eloquent than the Colosseum and the aqueducts. By the nineteenth century, the gate had turned into a heap of stone. These two drawings, three hundred years apart, inspired me for a whole decade to photograph the Chornobyl frescoes, which kept falling and falling to the ground until they exposed the concrete wall.
But ruins are silent. Vaults cannot speak; the wind and the rustling of grass speak for them, and they only soothe us, as do most forms of silence. And from the window of the Pripyat apartment on Lesya Ukrainka Street ∞, looking into the forest, it is so easy to forget the pain of this land, the lamentations of the past, the crowds of spirits.
There is no sense in continuing the post-accident Chornobyl pain, because Alexievich’s voice has already been heard, and the voices of spirits have long since flowed out of the volumes of ethnographic expeditions, from thousands of pages of archaic suffixes, lost endings, dialectisms, and words through which the past has always spoken to us. And yet… I found something from the library of universal pain, from the repository of horrors of massive hostile invasions: Mongol, Hunnic, Nazi… something I am thinking of contemplating for a while longer. Once again I turned to the history of Mesoamerica, whose jungle-and-pyramid cardiogram has long been inscribed forever into my pilgrim map.
Weighty monographs on Aztec history fail to convey the pain of loss… but there is one text, in force and depth close to the voices of Voices from Chernobyl. A text in tune with the cosmos of a cry of death, with suffering trailing behind it like the long tail of a comet as it departs into the arms of eternity, into the total acceptance of its own collapse. It is the work of the searing Gustave Le Clézio, who lived in the Central American wilderness long enough to open what can only be called a portal: La Fête chantée et autres essais de thème amérindien, in which he conveys the pain of Mesoamerican civilization’s collapse, taking the reader by the hand and leading them through written sources such as “the testament of an entire people” and “attempts to stop time and save memory, ready to melt away without a trace.” He gives you the codes to these chests of testament, just as Milan Kundera, in his essay Testaments Betrayed, laid out the keys to reading Rabelais, Cervantes, Kafka, Rushdie.
At first, Le Clézio’s note seems too high, but his voice flows from lived experience, from shared suffering, among the remains of which he seems to have spent an eternity, in order to tell how the manifestos of pain were made:
“In the silence of monasteries, not far from the destroyed capital… the former scribes of the ancient god Huitzilopochtli and the surviving noble elders, courtiers of King Moctezuma, gathered under the protection of the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún to pay their debt of memory to the vanished generations.
Yet the picture of the past was full of gaps, and these had to be filled with fragments of myth: traditions of a glorious past, to which the greatest poets and musicians had lent their voices. Thus arose the myth of a golden age in which harmony reigned among people and all-powerful gods ruled everything.
It is precisely these myths that Bernardino de Sahagún tries to set down when, under his supervision, a body of manuscripts is assembled from which the ‘Florentine Codex’ is later compiled, including historical narratives, legends, religious hymns, descriptions of dances, ritual ceremonies, costumes, tribal distinctions, reproductions of ancient maps marking villages and routes of trade by land and water; moral exhortations, medical recipes, sorcerers’ incantations, love lyrics, and riddles.
In feverish haste, its makers set down the history of ancient America on large sheets of sisal paper, folded again and again—the method they had used in the old temples. Now they hurry to tell what they know, as though believing that, despite defeat in war, the future still belongs to them and that books must bring future generations into communion with the treasures of their memory.”
The deeper I plunge into Polesia, the stronger the sense of the Florentine Codex becomes: I meditate in haste, watching the frescoes flake away and the routes be swallowed by the bog.
I fear I will not manage to record it in time in this untamed world—while life, alluring as it is, truly flashes by like a comet—and I keep gathering little fragments and carrying them around in a bag, only to spread them out later at the flea market of the past, memory, and pain.
Le Clézio knows a thing or two about pain. Granted, the seventies are his subject—but what is half a century when we are speaking of absolute forms of collective and individual pain?
***
I touched Mesoamerican pain to complete the continuum of Polesia’s vanishing, because I stand as an Indian in literature before the advance of the proactive, the energetic, and the correct. At some point, I realized that I was disappearing. That my voice, though not weakening, was ceasing to be heard, as if I were a ghost from a Caseres novel, no longer heard, no longer seen. That I am that Polesian ancestral spirit for whom, for many years on the Day of the Dead, they set out a bowl of food by the sacred table.
Mythogeography is a story about ruins on every level, because ruins are about my soul. A story about voices of the wind among stone jaws gnawed by time and their paradoxical magnetism. I return to the sources that deepen our first contact with the abandoned, our encounter with Pripyat, which will be remembered until the oil in Dubai runs out and it stands empty waist-deep in golden drifts, and the creeping waves of dunes erode its slender body, and the images from there replace even the jungles of Lesya Ukrainka Street—my own Tenochitlan.
And this, of course, is about contact with the majestic heart of the Other—the very point toward which the Azores statue seemed to gesture; about the rhythms of hundreds of thousands of Indian hearts beating, described with such ecstasy by a participant in Cortés’s expedition, Díaz del Castillo:
“…and when we saw that straight and level road leading to Mexico, we were astonished and said that it seemed like the magic from the legend of Amadís, because of the great towers and pyramids and buildings rising out of the water, all of them of stone. And some of ours even asked whether all this might not be a dream?”
These testimonies speak to us in the universal language of first contact, and this language is the same for Pripyat as for the populous Indian megacities, because the tectonics of first contact are earthshatteringly powerful not for their subject—the abandoned—but for what they open: the undiscovered, the significant, the majestic. The meeting of two worlds, a resynchronization after rupture, as if the proactive, the modern, and the correct were suddenly speaking with Polesian ancestral spirits.
If the encounter with the Aztec capital above is close in essence to contact with Pripyat, then the apex of this unity of form and essence is Hernando de Soto’s expedition of 1540, passing through the settlements of the Mississippi culture, wiped out by epidemics just a few years earlier. Behind the laconic phrase “…many abandoned villages” in a participant’s diary, and in the brief mentions by Jared Diamond, there unfolds a surreal picture: long streets of proto-cities with towering earthen mounds and houses perched on their summits—and not a soul inside, the ruins still fresh, and no one knows where everyone has gone.
What did the Spaniards think? Did they ask each other if this was a dream? Did they listen, warily, to the voices of spirits? Did they fear the earthen pyramids and deserted houses as I once feared the night in Pripyat fifteen years ago, walking for the first time between the cliffs of high-rises along an endless avenue—a bridge into the heart of my own Tenochtitlan, once described with such wonder by Díaz del Castillo?
What did the Spaniards feel when they returned to the ruins of Buenos Aires to found it again? What kind of ecstasy filled them in 1580, at the moment of drawing up the Acta de fundación de Buenos Aires, a fortress abandoned for thirty-nine years, bearing the godlike name “Our Lady Holy Mary of Good Air” (Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire)? What legends did they recall as they returned to the bay of the “Sweet Sea”? The Acta de fundación speaks in the deeply religious language of communion, with the solemnity of Romulus and Remus:
“In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons and one true God, who lives and reigns forever and ever, and of the most glorious Virgin Mary, His mother, and all the saints. Heavenly court, I, Juan García Garay, lieutenant governor and captain general, and also chief justice and chief sheriff in all these provinces … on behalf of His Majesty King Don Felipe, our lord, today Saturday … the eleventh day of the month of June in the year of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, one thousand five hundred and eighty, being in this port of Santa María de Buenos Aires, in the province of Río de la Plata, under the name of New Biscay, I founded a city in the said place and port, which I built with the soldiers and men who are here now … I say that I create a city in this part … considering it the best that I have found so far …
Juan de Garay.
Pedro de Jerez, public notary.”
Tenochtitlan, Buenos Aires, and Pripyat are most interesting in their phases of birth and afterlife, when among ziggurats, Soviet high-rises, and earthen mound-pyramids only the creaking of suspension bridges and the echo of birdsong can be heard. These rhythmic flashes are the heart itself, the pulses of the Tigris and Euphrates, signaling the harvest and setting the rhythms of life.
The first death of Buenos Aires was typical. The Indians killed the conquerors of Sweet Sea Bay, and the survivors had to flee all the way to Asunción. The German mercenary Ulrico Schmidl left behind memories of life in the fortress of Good Air and of the agony of flight: “…in this journey we had to suffer, and I described it as briefly as possible,” “Then we understood that there was no other way but to call upon our Almighty Lord to have mercy on us and save us. And at that very moment our ship burst into one hundred thousand pieces, and they sank…”
“There we built a city called Buenos Aires, which in German means gueter windt (good wind),” “…with an earthen wall about half a spear in height around it, and inside it a strong house for our commander; the city wall was about three feet thick…,” “…the Indians attacked us and our city with great force … some tried to storm it, while others began shooting fire arrows at our houses, whose roofs were made of straw, except for our captain-general’s roof…”
The tone of these accounts of evacuation, their monotony and apparent calm, recalls the 1986 announcement:
“Attention, attention! Esteemed comrades! The city council of people’s deputies informs you that, due to the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, an unfavorable radiation situation has developed in the city of Pripyat. Party and Soviet authorities…”
The colonists held out for only a few years, and the testimonies above are perhaps the only ones we have of the city’s founding and first death:
“After this we were forced to walk ten miles on foot. We lost all our clothing on the ship, as well as provisions, and had to make do with roots and berries … our captain in Bonas-Ayres was very sad about us and believed we had perished, and he ordered masses to be said for us. And when we arrived … when all the people had gathered … he ordered … the boats to be prepared, gathered all the people, burned the large ships and kept the smaller boats and the provisions store, and then we sailed up the Paraná River…”
Ghosts. Shadows that returned to the doomed city, which no longer exists, spirits for whom posthumous masses had already been said… They gathered and left the fortress, heading up the river of forgetfulness, so that it would remain abandoned for exactly as long as Pripyat has stood.
And it makes no difference whether we are speaking of a “full-sized” city, the megacity Tenochtitlan, or the tiny fortress of Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire in the heart of darkness, because we are speaking of the city as altar, and the Acta de fundación de Buenos Aires above so strongly resembles the consecration of a church altar, the founding of a temple.
For settlements grew up around temples, just as the village grew up around the stone chapel of Davidova Bozhenka, and Pripyat grew up around ChAES, a temple of eternal fire, where the “god of fire” turned out to be an evil demon and the temple had to be sealed forever.
***
All those “Esteemed comrades! The City Council of People’s Deputies…” and “…he burned the large ships … and then we sailed up the Paraná River” are documents of the same order and work in synergy, but the effect remains incomplete without broader testimony to the shock of first contact with the abandoned, resonating with the first visit to Pripyat.
And here it is impossible to ignore “Manuscript 512,” or the "Relação histórica de uma occulta e grande povoação antiguissima sem moradores, que se descobriu no anno de 1753".
It speaks of adventurers and seekers of ancient conquistador treasure who, already in the age of Rousseau and Voltaire, had buried themselves hundreds of kilometers deep in the Brazilian wilderness, while the colonial authorities were still jokingly calling themselves the “Coast Administration,” wryly mocking the fact that the continent remained unexplored.
As so often in myths: the seekers made camp, spotted a deer, and set off to hunt it. In pursuit, they stumbled upon an overgrown road, cleared it, and discovered a medium-sized city with streets and a square, houses “with façades of carved, already blackened stone.”
Even if the manuscript is pure invention or hyperbole, what interests us is the structure of first contact with the abandoned as it appears in that era:
“…we decided to enter armed at dawn, and there was no one who came out to stop us … the entrance was through three arches of great height, the largest in the middle, the two on the sides smaller; on the main arch we made out letters, which could not be copied because of the great height.”
“…we were astonished to find the settlement abandoned, and despite our faithful diligence found no one who might tell us about this sorrowful wonder, whose settlement it was, clearly showing in its ruins the appearance and grandeur it surely had, and how populous and rich it was in the centuries when it flourished; today swallows, bats, rats, and foxes inhabit it, and the latter, feeding on the many chickens and ducks, grow larger than a pointer dog.”
“We walked around several houses with no small fear and found in none of them any trace of utensils or furniture, by whose use and handling we might have learned the character of the inhabitants; all the houses were dark inside and had only scant light, and because they were vaulted, the echo of those who spoke was reflected, and the voices themselves frightened us.”
Would the Portuguese have been unable to believe the city was abandoned, taking the echo for voices? Are we dealing with fiction?
Some of the descriptions are worth attention, because they are concentrated conquistadorism, and in the sheer abundance of detail and exuberance of imagination they are more powerful than descriptions of the Aztec capital:
“…the bats were so numerous that they swooped at faces and made an astonishing noise; on the main portico of the street there is a relief figure, carved in stone and bare from the waist up, crowned with laurel; it depicts a young man, beardless, with a cross-band and a skirt around the waist; beneath the shield of the figure are letters, worn away by time.”
“…we found ourselves in a square of regular shape, and in its center a column of black stone of extraordinary size, and upon it a statue of an ordinary man, one hand on his left side and the right outstretched, with the index finger pointing to the North Pole; in each corner of the square stood an obelisk in imitation of those used by the Romans, though some were already damaged and broken, as if struck by lightning.”
Here there is room for the joke that this is the very colony toward which the Azorean Baal Hammon was pointing, and above all that the whole story may be invention or hyperbole.
The document appeared only a couple of decades after the discovery of Heracleion, whose grandeur may have influenced the author, who invented triumphal arches and Trajan-like columns, or else hyperbolized the tales of some traveler about a reeking village in the Brazilian region of Gentio do Ouro, where the rocky formations really do resemble fragments of “majestic ruins,” and where indigenous rock paintings could have served as the prototype of the “Phoenician-like” inscriptions, copies of which were even appended to the manuscript.
Or maybe Percy Fawcett did not die in vain after all.
***
Le Clézio’s La Fête chantée contains episodes from the chronicle Description of Michoacán and the Nobel interpretation of a tribe’s discovery of a city in that same, original sense: as an altar:
“The Chichimeca warriors moved away from the shore of the lake, plunged into the forest, and suddenly before them opened a city with many temples, which had earlier appeared to their leaders in divine revelation.
They named it ‘Foundation of the Temples’; a mysterious place where huge boulders were piled in disorder.
Lost in the forest, the city testified to the near presence of the gods, for ‘if one judges by what the traditions say, the god of the underworld gathered these rocks together as the foundation for building temples in honor of the elder gods.’
Continuing on, the warriors climbed upstream along one of the streams and gradually, as though in a dream, a landscape opened before them, one that seemed to have been waiting for them from the beginning.
And they said to one another: “Come here — this is the place our gods call ‘On the Rocky Shore of Pátzcuaro.’ Look at it — what do you make of it?”’
The place was quite far from the city. One cannot help thinking of the Arthurian forest, full of wondrous mystery. The Chichimeca made their way, trembling, through the “dark and wild” thickets, above which, shutting out the daylight, rose the crowns of giant oaks, recalling the darkness of the world just created, or perhaps the secret of the realm of Aztlán, the homeland of the Chichimeca.
It seems that here, amid the chaos of stones, in the forest gloom, the providential burden of future destiny first settled on the shoulders of the Chichimeca: from the earth rose future temples, houses of a city not yet existing, and perhaps even the first monuments of Christian conquerors already began to glimmer.
Moving a little deeper into the forest, the warriors found a place clearly intended for their supreme deity Curicaueri — and there they understood that it was time to stop, for the point of the magical center of the world had been reached.
The deceased ruler proclaimed that in this place, and in no other, stood the Gates through which the gods descended to earth and rose again to heaven.
This is probably the most poetic and stirring event in the history of the conquest of Michoacán. And one of the most important. It is there that the empire is born, and from there it draws its faith in its divine election.
From that moment on, the fearsome Chichimeca warriors cease to be merely a band of adventurers in search of good lands and become an elected people, while their leaders become kings and warlords who have received from the gods themselves the tidings of their lofty destiny.”
All these exact formulations, so deeply familiar to me after years of exploring the Zone, turn out to be universal — like a city-altar and the feeling of first contact, whether it be Tenochtitlan, the mounds of Mississippi culture, or dawn Pripyat.
“Landscape that seemed to have been waiting for them from the very beginning,” “the crowns of giant oaks, recalling the darkness of the world just created,” “giant stone boulders … ‘as though still unworked idols’” — these are eternal formulas, metatags of a history not “about the abandoned,” but about a complex of sensations that, over the last six hundred years, has grown attributes and become a full-fledged archetypal plot of “encounter with the past” — a new plot, Borges.
Le Clézio’s mention of the boulders that “the god of the underworld gathered together … as the foundation for building temples in honor of the elder gods” is especially interesting in the context of another object on my mythomap: the boulders of the “Stone Village” nature reserve in Zhytomyr region, a product of glacial action. Around them circulate many baseless but striking hypotheses, as if they were the remains of relic mountains so ancient that they were buried beneath the earth until the glacier, retreating northward, shaved away the soil and the peaks emerged from under the ground. My tribes of androphagi in the non-contact jungles of Polesia won’t even have to go far.
There are enough details, but my map will still remain text — because this is about another world: knotted writing versus the alphabet and the route-history of Aztec maps, which look more like travelogues than General Staff maps. A map to be read, not merely “read,” an allusion to otherness, a reference to the Other World, at which the Azorean Baal Hammon was pointing.
Among the Aztecs, the reason for making a map is often demarcation, an argument in territorial disputes. Once, I went to Chornobyl with a cameraman, and for some reason he filmed me relieving myself near Pripyat. I said those were the best shots from the trip. I do not know whether he understood why. After the world is created, it has to be ritually measured, rites of ordering and marking performed — it has to be moved from chaos into an освоєна, inhabited form.
And if Stalking The Atomic City was creation, then Mythogeography is naming space, the ancient mythology of my Zone, a periplus where androphagi, Phoenician gods, Old Rus’ chapels, relic Caspian tigers, and details keep accumulating until Bosch finally gives you a wink.
***
Desiccation is the common denominator of Tenochtitlan, Polesia, and the Chornobyl Zone. A powerful symbol of death, a ruin in landscape terms, more eloquent than the erosion of stone statues and the falling away of Soviet frescoes.
Tenochtitlan is on the list not only because of that sweet pair, that double star system of Polesia–Mesoamerica. The draining of Lake Texcoco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Mexicans is a symbol of the final disappearance of America, destroyed by the conquistadors—just as the land-reclamation programs of the Russian Empire and the USSR destroyed “authentic” Polesia.
And this was not a peculiarity of Russia or Mexico, but a symptom of an age when vast infrastructure projects were in fashion, when the planning of the Panama Canal and the building of the Suez were on everyone’s mind—projects that meant an invasion of nature itself.
And the spark of inspiration was lit again by conquistadors, even if later ones. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt and the foundational work, Description de l’Égypte of 1809, gave a powerful impulse not only to Egyptomania, but also to government interest in serious hydrological projects. The French described a mass of antiquities and a network of once-navigable canals abandoned because of the Nile’s transgression.
Napoleon is rather sparing in his journals and mentions only that he sent engineers to inspect the Suez Canal: “I am working to determine the line along which a waterway may be laid to connect the Nile and the Red Sea. This route once existed; I found traces of it in several places.”
Description de l’Égypte, by contrast, contains descriptions of a direct encounter with the dried-out land—though no longer the pious fear of Manuscript 512, or the ecstatic interpretations of Le Clézio in his contact with the city-altar—for Description… is a product of Enlightenment encyclopedism, with its rationalism and its urge to systematize the world:
“Beyond the cultivated plain the land is sandy and rises slowly toward the limestone mountains that border the horizon on both sides.
In the Arabian range we see the beginning of a valley that, they say, leads to the Red Sea.
The countryside of Esna is no longer watered by the usual inundations of the Nile… to the north there are a few gardens. These indisputable witnesses to the fertility of the soil, and the barren pasture around them, are a striking contrast and prove how easy it would be to preserve the province’s fertility if the ancient canal, whose mouth lies some distance above the town and whose traces can be seen in the countryside, were still preserved: restoring it would still be of great advantage; but the locals’ indifference is extraordinary. Instead of trying to restore fertility, they have gone off to cultivate the lowlands irrigated by the river’s flood. This migration leads to the depopulation of the country, and the means of combating the evil diminish as the evil itself increases its destructive effects.”
The large-scale irrigation projects of the Russian Empire and the draining of Texcoco are an evolution of Enlightenment’s inclination toward edging and trimming, toward turning the broken tracks of the Middle Ages into neat paths. The Russian Empire loved French, read Description de l’Égypte, and took inspiration from it; and so it came to Polesia with an expedition in 1873–1898.
The brick-like Sketch of the Works of the Western Expedition for the Drainage of the Marshes already uses, with regard to Polesia, neither vague Herodotean formulations like “Neuri and androphagi,” nor Old Rus’ mythogeographic labels like “impenetrable forests, Drevlyans, pagan horror,” but a concise landscape description:
“…in broad outline Polesia presents a vast plain, like the bottom of a giant flat-bottomed vessel with raised edges.”
One of the first phrases to show the region was being understood not as a “Dark Forest,” an amorphous mythogeographic blot, but as a studied object. Not to mention that even the leader’s notes at times recall conquistador diaries.
Although the Sketch…, like the expedition itself, follows Description de l’Égypte, it is at the same time an invaluable document about Polesia before the intrusion of the mechanical and atomic tentacles of colonization.
The draining of Texcoco and the reclamation of Polesia have a common cause and a common root: both are products of the globalization of that era, and both processes are not only deeply colonial, but also mark the retreat into the past of history itself, and of the landscape itself, in the terrifying literalization of its drying out. Drying here is not just death, but uprooting, fading into a reservoir of pain that itself is slowly disappearing.
The geographical equivalent of agony.
And so it is not the symbolic, pompous shutdown of the last block of ChAES, not President Kuchma’s turning of the station key in 2000, that best symbolizes the dying of the “good old” Zone, the dying of poisoned land, and the eloquent failure of atomic colonization of Polesia, but the drying up of the Chornobyl cooling pond.
In 2014 I wrote about my last dates with the lake:
“It was farewell to the Old Zone of the old ChAES pipe—the symbol of an era. I was always afraid I would not have time to look enough, and that my nostalgia would be saddened by this unfortunate lack of time, this failure. But I did have time. And when the Pond is drained, I will be calm, because I had time to remember, to carve it in, to name it.”
The Pond was sacred to me, which is why I wrote its name with a capital letter. After it dried out, I came to witness the fundamental change, and even crossed its bottom a couple of times, but I deliberately avoided making regular routes there, because I treated the place as though “the big water” were still there.
I still do.
And I look at the bog as if it were land.
I cross the marsh waist-deep, straight through, repeating: “Roads are just a topographic construct imposed on us by imperial cartography.”
This way of seeing does not trap the world in a net of routes; it makes the landscape continuous.
A sense of continuity is important for Polesia as a continuum, and for the related processes of dying, drying, disappearance.
Broader still, it applies to ruins, because “ruins” are not a sentence: once even medieval Paris stood half-abandoned, not to mention Kyiv in the late nineties.
The semantics of drying are especially symbolic for Polesia, because the disappearance of swamp and water is the departure of that which caused the region’s isolation, which preserved dialects, customs, and beliefs in the amber of time-stoppage.
It turned them into relics, and gave us the chance to look at them.
***
Herodotus’ Sea is a key image for understanding Polesia: a postglacial lake that survived into the late Middle Ages. Polesian bogs are its remains.
“Millennia separate us from the era when the entire valley of the Pripyat, the so-called Pinsk Polesia, was covered with water — Herodotus’ Sea, the land of waters and mists, as Darius Hystaspes calls it in his campaign against the Scythians,” Adam Kirkor wrote about it in 1882. The author of Outline of the Works of the Western Expedition for the Drainage of the Marshes (1873–1898) still caught the sea’s remains and noted laconically that “river overflows occupy enormous spaces and sometimes last until autumn.”
Then came the waves of reclamation and the infrastructure of the peaceful atom, and the water withdrew. Yet I choose to believe that the sea’s final flare came not during the floods of the Soviet era, but in the spring flood of 2013. That winter, the snow fell so heavily that a section of the sarcophagus collapsed, and to cover four kilometers from one village to the next, I spent more than three hours waist-deep in drifts. In spring everything flooded, and the overflows etched themselves into memory. I dug down to Herodotus’ Sea, and I liked feeling that this was its last appearance, like the light of long-extinguished stars that we still managed to see.
Ten years ago I wrote about it from the bottom of the dried-out cooling pond:
“We are right on its shore. Over there, rusty anchors jut out of the ground. Drop your backpacks, let’s look for the remains of boats… Have you seen Polesia in early modern engravings? A land on the shore of a great water. A northern Venice on bamboo piles by the ocean. And that ocean reached down into the underworld, while sea monsters licked the feet of pilgrims with rough tongues. What Herodotus? Three hundred years ago the Enlighteners wrote that the wyverns had not yet died out here. They still haven’t died out — so be careful, we are in open country. Beauplan also wrote about the sea: in ancient times it reached the Holy Sophia. He wrote about anchors in fields a hundred kilometers to the east. And he was not writing for nothing. Have you heard of the Caspian transgression?”
The sea departed, finally reborn in the anti-form of the equally vanished artificial cooling pond: a structural element of the Temple of Fire, where ChAES is the altar and Pripyat the satellite, like a village around an Old Rus’ chapel.
Tomorrow a pair of “Кинжал” missiles may strike the Kyiv dam, and Bozhenka may appear — another great body of water will “withdraw” before our eyes, as if this were some Anti-Bible in which everyone gorges on forbidden fruit from morning till night and God rewards them for it, where water “withdraws” instead of flooding as a result of deliberate anthropogenic action, and God has not even died… he has simply been worn out by everything and joined the bacchanalia. Where, instead of the Tower of Babel, AI suddenly explodes with translation and Portuguese document recognition — the triumph of ratio over eschatology in the very midst of a war on biblical scale.
Texcoco and the cooling pond were both the energy base of cities: the lake fed the Aztecs, the pond cooled the Chornobyl nuclear plant. The relict glacial lakes of Polesia were the basis of the bogs, which triggered isolation, preserved the language, influenced fateful decisions, and forced conquerors to go around those bogs.
In the end, the relics of the glacier isolated the region so thoroughly that one hundred and fifty years ago the Poleshuks were described as non-contact peoples:
“Separated from the inhabitants of neighboring districts by a wide, unbroken network of rivers and tributaries, surrounded on all sides by dense, impassable forests, the Pinsk people almost never leave this enchanted water labyrinth and, settled in their black, sticky marshes, lead a kind of isolated life, without any ties not only to other towns and settlements, but even to their own town of Pinsk.
The appearance of a Pinsk man in another district, especially in Minsk, is a great rarity. When one arrives there, people look at him as if at some overseas guest; crowds gather in the square to see the unusual spectacle. Even the speech of a Pinsk man does not resemble that of other inhabitants of the Minsk province.” “The women of Pinsk also dress in a particular way: around their necks are many ribbons, amber ornaments, crayfish eyes, copper and silver coins, beads and glass. Their outer clothing is made of blue or brown cloth of the most original patterns; beneath it — a corset with red trimming and shiny metal buttons. Instead of a dress — a colored woolen andarak (a homespun striped or checkered skirt), edged with ribbons. On a leather belt — a pouch with needle, thread, knife, and comb. On their hands — always many rings.”
It is simply “the appearance of the Indian,” and if you throw a jaguar skin over the andarak and rings, you could easily think an Amazonian shaman has stepped out to the hacienda to trade fruit for metal trinkets.
Globalization-melioration, atheization-electrification reached there too, and the Pinsk people-Amazons disappeared; the Polesia of the imperial expedition disappeared too, and Herodotus’ Sea disappeared, the last flare of which I witnessed in 2013, and the death of the cooling pond I watched until it vanished completely.
And one semantics of drying alone cannot convey the convulsions of Polesia, the continuum of dying-and-disappearing, of fading-and-flaring, and of the final floodings, so to seize one image and try to lock everything inside it is the same as equating a regular 65,537-gon with a circle merely because it looks similar. But there is nuance.
And one semantics of drying cannot convey the convulsions of Polesia, the continuum of dying-and-disappearing, of fading-and-flaring, and of the final floodings, so to seize one image and try to lock everything inside it is the same as equating a regular 65,537-gon with a circle merely because it looks similar. There is nuance.
And the research and systematization alone will not reveal the essence. It is like chaos, which at first seemed like “disorder,” until it turned out that the anomalies in the calculations, once considered errors, were elements of much larger patterns, detectable only with the help of supercomputers. And those patterns are frighteningly similar in processes ranging from cloud formation to population dynamics — a system whose regularities we have not yet learned to understand. So to see Polesia, one has to sit there until madness: all those Chornobyl binges and the deliberate self-driving into madness in the Amazon thickets of Europe are a method of knowing chaos, a way to attach its dancing skeleton to the linear structures of systematization, categorization, and cognition.
That is what Stalking the Atomic City did. But the method is universal, and it is worth extending beyond “Polesian” material, because this is not about working with landscape from within its own properties, but about extracting the essence of landscape through madness. I mean Hunter Thompson and the key scene in his novel The Curse of Lono, an author whom the mainstream lazily reduces to a hooligan and a cheerful madman, when in fact things are much more interesting.
Not because of the drugs in which he plunged so deeply, but because his books are profoundly about geography and landscape. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is desert. The Rum Diary is Puerto Rico, the essence of Kentucky in “Derby…” — even Hell’s Angels is about the motorized освоение of space, which is what Easy Rider was later made about.
In The Curse of Lono, Thompson, as usual, goes on assignment, and offstage you can hear the line from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: “And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…” — the image of Johnny Sins in a firefighter’s uniform, and it is obvious what fires are about to begin and what he will put them out with. Yet beneath the surface comedy and unchecked frenzy, the author holds the core of existential horror away from inattentive readers.
A systematic and carefully devised tactic for reaching madness, opening new facets of myth and space. A deliberately misanthropic text, where smoke and delirium are bait and the plot of a parable, a convenient staircase to the heart of Hawaiian mythic foundations.
The author understands perfectly that one can touch the essence of a place only by sitting there until madness. And he sits: burning through money, making enemies, and pumping himself full of hard drugs. In the first days, having handled the editorial task with virtuosity, Thompson begins his immersion into Hawaii and the myth of Lono: the crazed and maniacally cruel god who once left, but was supposed to return, and who, in the form of James Cook, was received by the Hawaiians with full honors.
In the end, the author reaches the sought-for madness and becomes an embodiment of Lono: he beats the land with a club, splitting it piece by piece, repeating the god’s act of world-making and world-destruction, until only islands remain jutting out of the water — the Pacific landscape and flashes of clarity in an ocean of madness.
The climax of The Curse of Lono is right here:
“I sprang out of the goddamn fighting chair and, instead of grabbing that silly little aluminum baseball bat they normally use to finish off these beasts with ten or fifteen whacks… That’s when I reached into my kitbag and brought out the war club and kicked Steve out of the way and then, with a terrible shriek, I hit the beast with a running shot that dropped it back into the water like a stone and caused about sixty seconds of absolute silence in the cockpit.
They weren’t ready for it. The last time anybody killed a big marlin in Hawaii with a short-handled Samoan war club was about three hundred years ago… and let me tell you, King Kam was lucky that fisherman used a paddle on his head, instead of that thing I swung on the fish; we might never have had any talk about “Laws of the splintered etc…” Anyway, here’s a selection of photos. I wish I could send you more, but it all happened so fast that I had a hell of a time getting any pictures at all… I not only had to use the business end of a rod and reel for the first time in my life to drag a 300-pound monster out of the sea in less than twenty minutes and then kill it in the midst of a frenzy right in front of my face, but I also had to rush back into the cabin and get the camera and shoot a whole roll/pack in less than 30 seconds.
Very fast and savage work, Ralph. You’d have been proud of me. Indeed… but the real story of that high-strung blood-spattered day was not so much in the catching of the fish (any fool can do that) – but in our arrival at the pier, which freaked everybody, even Laila.
We came in wild and bellowing, Ralph. They said they could hear me screaming about a half mile out… I was shaking the war club at the drunken bastard Norwood on the pier and cursing every booze-crazy incompetent son of a pig-fucking missionary bastard that ever set foot in Hawaii… People cringed and shrunk back in silence, as this terrible drunken screaming came closer and closer to the pier…
They thought I was screaming at them. Nobody on the pier had any idea that I was talking (at the top of my lungs) to Norwood — and the rumbling of our diesel engines was so loud that it seemed to me that I could barely make myself heard.
Which was not the case. They could hear me at the bar in the Kona Inn, 500 yards across the bay… and to the big afternoon crowd on the pier, Laila said, it sounded like the second coming of Lono. I raved for fifteen minutes, the whole time it took us to tie up…
The crowd was horrified, and even Laila tried to act like she didn’t know us when I hurled a 15-pound ahi at her from about 10 yards out. It hit on the concrete pier with a nasty wet smack, but nobody picked it up, or even spoke… they hated everything we stood for, and when I jumped up on the pier and began whipping on the fish with the war club, nobody even smiled.”
The scene of unjustified violence against a fish is more powerful than the ecstatic encounter of the Chichimecs with the city of the gods. The clubbing of the fish is really the clubbing of the pier, the island, the land itself… the myth of the giant god from Easter Island, who with a heavy club made and destroyed the world, and got so carried away that he sent an entire continent under the water — leaving only one island in the ocean.
Thompson ultimately reveals and makes explicit that from the start he understood his function: to be a factor of chaos, a provocateur who reveals the hidden logic of the order / world-structure / mythic ground that, in his absence, was invisible, resting in a state of calm:
“The trouble began on the day I caught the fish — or, more specifically, it began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about “filthy drunken sons of missionaries” and “lying scum” and “doomed pig-fuckers” and all those other things I mentioned in my last update letter.
What I didn’t tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming, “I am Lono!” in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the w hole waterfront, from the Hilton to the King Kam — and that many of these people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.
I don’t know what got into me, Ralph — I didn’t mean to say it — at least not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because they are superstitious people, as you know , and they take their legends seriously. Which is understandable, I think, in the minds of people who still shudder at the memory of what happened when they bungled Lono’s last visit. (M.K. — meaning James Cook).
It was not surprising, in retrospect, that my King Kong-style arrival in Kailua Bay on a hot afternoon in the spring of 1981 had a bad effect on the natives. The word traveled swiftly up and down the coast, and by nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had comefrom as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if the rumor was really true — that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of a huge drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands and then beat them to death on the dock with a short-handled Samoan war club.
By noon the next day these rumors of native unrest had reached our friends in the real estate bund, who saw it as the “last straw ,” they said later, and reached a consensus decision to get me out of tow non the next plane. This new s was conveyed to me by Bob Mardian at the bar of the Kona Inn, which he owns.
“These guys are not kidding,” he warned me. “They want to put you in Hilo Prison.
“He glanced nervously around the bar to see who was listening, then grasped my arm firmly and leaned his head close to mine.
“This is serious,” he whispered. “I’ve got three waitresses who won’t come to work until you’re gone.”
“Gone?” I said. ‘“What do you mean?”
He stared at me for a moment, drumming his fingers on the bar.
“Look,” he said finally. “You’ve gone too far this time. It’s not funny anymore. You’re fucking w ith their religion. The whole town is stirred up. The realtors had a big meeting today, and they tried to blame it on me.”
I called for another brace of margaritas — which Mardian declined, so I drank them both — while I listened. It was the first time I’d ever seen Mardian take anything seriously.
“This Lono thing is dangerous,” he was saying. “It’s the one thing they really believe in.”
I nodded.
“I wasn’t here when it happened,” he went on, “but it was the first thing I heard about when I got off the plane — ‘Lono is back, Lono is back.’
The myth of Lono’s return is really about any Messiah whom people have waited and waited for, and who finally arrives only to prove himself, on inspection, to be a drunk and an idiot; just as the circle suddenly turns out to be a 65,537-gon, chaos is an incomparably more complex pattern of something larger, and Hunter Thompson, with his apparent drunken frenzy, is a researcher who is fully aware of himself as a factor of chaos, a provoking, revealing tablet that brings hidden desires into view, even if in the text he himself seems to be gorging on those tablets.
***
War is not just a generator of ruins, but a mythogeographic accelerator — a Large Hadron Collider.
In cartography and the mythic imagination, terra incognita can remain stable for epochs. Combat today keeps generating new versions of it, even in positional warfare.
The front rolls forward in a hurricane of “fog of war” — a running update of terra incognita — forcing us to conceptualize unexplored space on the fly.
It can race along at any speed, but even then we still have to scout, name new positions, separate sectors, and newly formed landmarks after powerful bombardments that alter both orientation and the landscape itself.
The stability of older maps stands in stark contrast to the chase after today’s new versions, dynamic as traffic on Cairo’s squares.
Brutal frontline humor and eloquent names for landmarks are not new, but it is precisely with the arrival of tablets and chats among ordinary soldiers that personal mythogeography boomed: the ability to add and delete endlessly finally appeared.
It is like the explosion in the number of shots that came with iPhoneography. What matters is not going through every image, but spotting patterns that had not yet come into view, before the sample is statistically large enough.
For understanding how mythogeography works, the eloquent names of minefields are crucial: the deliberately playful “little garden” is a murderous kill zone, packed with mines, tripwires, and “petals,” where getting through without blowing up is winning the lottery.
All those “butthole thickets,” “asshole17,” “Sherwood forest,” and the rest of the colorful, ironic names for assembly points, evacuation points, and positions are soaked in the doomed humor of a deep awareness of the gap between the desired and the real.
And that naming practice is analogous to the conceptualization of space that takes place in the Zone — “Dark Forest,” “endless swamp,” “Archipelago of forestry posts” — only war accelerates it like protons in a collider.
For understanding the conceptualization of space and the structural logic of human imagination, this is a Mariana Trench–deep source, a laboratory of acceleration, a statistical gold mine.
I wrote about something similar in the Zone in 2021: the evolution of spatial myths in the media attractor ‘Chornobyl’ is accelerating. Like computer code — which they call a model of the evolution of life, an ultrafast metaphor. The first lines of code from the Cold War era explode before our eyes into the digital fountain of the present etc., which is why the Zone is an ideal laboratory for such a study.
With the “fog of war,” terra incognita, and the conceptualization of space, it is much the same — only faster still.
Unfortunately, war has become the ideal environment for observing how certain processes evolve — processes that, in a calm phase, would have taken years to track.
***
The sudden construction of Pripyat in the middle of nowhere would seem, in theory, to strip it of myth — but, but, but.
It really has little of Romulus and Remus or the legends of expulsion from Aztlán with their long history of wandering and the founding of a new home.
Pripyat is the daughter of fateful decisions, and it has more in common with Buenos Aires and Constantinople than with Ovruch and Ivankiv, which arose “naturally” and slowly grew over with forests of wooden homesteads and the idols of temples.
Just as Alma Roma repeated the fate of old Rome, consecrated by Emperor Constantine the Great, so the light-bearing Pripyat repeated the fate of the titan Prometheus, and no matter how bitter what followed was, the bright words of its founding still shake me to the core, every single time:
“2 February 1967
Secret
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine
The Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR submits for approval the draft resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR on the choice of the site for construction of the Central Ukrainian Atomic Regional Power Station near the village of Kopachi, Chernobyl district, Kyiv oblast.”
“The site near the village of Kopachi was recommended by the state commission, approved by the collegium of the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR, and agreed with the Kyiv regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Kyiv regional executive committee, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Ukrainian SSR, the Ministry of Energy and Electrification of the Ukrainian SSR, and other interested organizations. The draft resolution and the certificate on the site selection are attached.
V. Shcherbytsky.”
The list of organizations is word for word the same as in the Acta de fundación de Buenos Aires:
“In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons and one true God, who lives and reigns…”
“the Kyiv regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Kyiv regional executive committee…”
And the signature: “V. Shcherbytsky Juan de Garay,” the last true conquistador founding a city in the jungle.
In the annex to the founding act we read:
“In 1965–1966, the Kyiv branch of Teploelektroproekt surveyed 16 sites in the Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Zhytomyr oblasts in order to identify a suitable and most economically advantageous site for the location of an atomic power station.
Of these 16 sites, 15 were rejected because they did not satisfy the necessary requirements for the location of atomic power stations or had not been agreed with the ministries and agencies of the Ukrainian SSR.
The site near the village of Kopachi, Chernobyl district, recommended by Teploelektroproekt and the state commission, is located on the right bank of the Pripyat, 12 km from Chernobyl, mainly on low-productivity land, and meets the requirements of water supply, transport, and the sanitary zone.”
“…I say that I create a city in this part … considering it the best that I have found so far…” — Juan de Garay, 1580.
Let this be a document about the founding of an atomic station, not a city, but Pripyat,
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the cooling pond are a triune structure of the Temple of Fire, and the central part of the triptych is precisely ChNPP, from which everything began. The altar is the essence of a religious structure, while the temple building is a superstructure, just as a village beside a chapel or an atomograd beside ChNPP is an annex.
The center of gravity, the star that launches a gas-and-dust cloud and shapes it into planets, remains the altar.
It is founded for ritual sacrifice; the place of sacrifice is the place of death, that is, of the soul’s ascent to the Heavens, and that is where the sacredness lies.
That is what the atomists in the Temple of Fire were doing: conducting complex rituals and sacrificing time in order to obtain the divine fire that would keep the tribe from freezing.
The altar is dedicated to Prometheus, and here, from the gray cliff of panel high-rises, the chrysoprase veins of myth suddenly break through.
The Promethean story is so archetypal that only it could root young Pripyat in the past no worse than the allusions to Troy at the founding of Constantinople.
The original Prometheus is a trickster from the cycle of stories about a sacred theft made for the sake of tribe, people, and common survival. The mythic ground for the USSR is close and legible: expropriation.
But the Soviet Prometheus is no longer the classical trickster, but a revolutionary, and the handing over of fire to people signifies a new era, everything before which is of no importance. He breaks the chains, mounts the techno-eagle, and calls toward the “bright” future.
The techno-futurist Soviet and the chthonic Polesian antagonisms collide in the myth collider: the “fire of the light of science,” together with the campaign of atheization, drives back the “impenetrable darkness of the past” — the customary archaism of the Dark Bog, the ancestral homeland of the Slavs, from whose marshes it all began, from the spark in the swamp of the primordial broth.
And Prometheus gave people not fire, but the “forbidden fruit,” that is, the possibility of seeing. In 2018 I wrote that the Zone would be incomplete without this story:
“As for Paradise, the Garden of Eden, or Paradise (from the Persian, ‘a place surrounded by a wall’), surrounded by a fence with cherubim at the entrance, and in the center of the garden — the Trees of Knowledge and Eternal Life rise. We were expelled from Eden for attempting knowledge (peaceful atom as a source of eternal energy), and the cherubim from the Chornobyl militia were placed to guard the entrance, so as not to let us return to Eden.”
The project of atomic colonization and the catastrophe of the Temple of Fire culminate in the frozen lament of the ruins, the eloquent cry of Prometheus stretched across decades.
And every time the pilgrim is in the Zone, he contemplates their embodied groan, slowly fading with the further crumbling of the ruins. The pilgrim here is not only a conquistador, but also an Argonaut, hearing Prometheus’s groans on the road to Colchis.
Many invoked him. In Aeschylus he is noble; Hesiod disliked him; in Byron he symbolizes strength and fatalism, yet even the most terrible torments cannot change him. Goethe, by contrast, hates Zeus and the gods who have gotten drunk on grandeur, and his emphasis is closest to me.
Many have turned to the image, but the most interesting passage was made by Taras Shevchenko. I first heard about Prometheus from my grandfather in early childhood. He often read the Kobzar, and I always loved these lines, their ecstatic, wrenching force:
“Beyond the mountains, mountains in cloud,
Sown with sorrow, drenched in blood.
Since time immemorial,
There Prometheus is punished by the eagle,
Which tears his ribs
And breaks his heart each day.”
This is a story of rebirth, although Shevchenko meant something else: his “Caucasus” is saturated with anti-colonial rhetoric against the actions of the Russian Empire in the region. It would simply be another strong poem of its time, but it is precisely Shevchenko’s “Caucasus” that returns Prometheus to the homeland of the pre-myth.
If the Greeks did not copy this story from Colchis, then they were definitely inspired by it. Among the Chechens there are priests whose task is to remain on the summit of a mountain to greet the Sun. They are “chained” to the rock like Prometheus, and must remain there constantly.
They, or rather their time and suffering, are the sacrifice, the “food” with which the Sun is fed so that it does not go out and continues to give warmth. The Aztecs fed their gods with human sacrifice in the same way. This is a primordial pre-motif which among the Caucasian peoples grew into literal sacrifice, but preserved the core of the essence: the priest sacrifices himself, his time, to the Sun god for the sake of the tribe and must remain there continuously, otherwise catastrophe will occur. Read it again now, in this light, and look at how much more myth it contains: the shift of ChNPP personnel that remained at the station after its seizure in 2022 is simply saturated with myth.
The story of Pripyat would not be complete without the second part of Shevchenko:
“It shatters, but does not drink
Living blood—
It lives again
And laughs again.”
Because this is also a story of rebirth.
In European myths, vegetation often walks beside death, while stone as its opposite points to immortality. That is why Prometheus is chained specifically to the rock, and why he “lives again and laughs again.”
Pripyat is phenomenal because it visualizes the inversion of the myth, turns it upside down: the force of life (vegetation) here defeats even the immortality of the gods (stone). That is one more reason we love the little birches sprouting through concrete slabs in Pripyat’s apartments — a figure more powerful than Nietzsche’s one-liner, “God is dead.”
Pripyat and its stones are Prometheus’s cry stretched through time: so piercing that only the green children of Persephone, quickly sprouting up from under our feet, are capable of drowning it out.
***
The time has come to step back from founding acts and city-foundation charters, from conquistador reports of violence and plunder, and from descriptions of exotic lands by expeditionary armies — to unroll the panoramic lens and look at the diorama from afar.
Mythogeographing, the roughness of an averaged world map drawn from memory by a dozen-odd people, and the meme “how americans see europe,” where an entire Italy is shown as a pizza or a bottle of dry red instead of France, are all manifestations of the same thing: deliberate simplification, the blur of overgeneralization, symbolic spatial schematization, and a stereotyped world map akin to the pilgrim regions of “Dark Forest,” or “Archipelago of forestry posts” — the modern version of dog-heads, krakens, and giants on medieval maps.
And my androphagi, Old Rus’ chapels, relict tigers, Phoenician statues, Native myths, the influence of Description de l’Égypte on the draining of Texcoco and the colonization of Polesia, Vova Shcherbytsky as the last conquistador, the similarity between the fate of Pripyat and the first incarnation of Buenos Aires, the crucial importance of the semantics of drying for understanding the Amazon of Europe, the Temple of Fire of ChNPP and the altar as a center of gravity, ruins as an allegory of Prometheus’s cry — all of this is a lemon-pink riot of color beneath the layer of General Staff topography, which one only needs to tear open a little, and there is an utterly wild bacchanalia and a panoramic Bosch canvas stretching across the history of civilization, fountainous psychopathic graffiti, startling to the uninitiated: chicken wings in a gift metal box of Rafaello, or glitches, surreal on smooth iPhone-like Gorilla Glass.
Pulling the exhibits of a historical cabinet of curiosities from my pockets, I do not intend to “add us to the ancient maps, joining us to Western civilization,” nor am I marking space the way a state does with monuments or street names; this is not even about reinventing Polesia as a personal locus amoenus… It is about feeling out historical-mythological translocality, not only between the isolated little islands of Europe’s Amazon and Mesoamerica, but elsewhere too, as though I were racing madly over the terrestrial disk, that same circle-indistinguishable 65,537-gon, searching for black spots of apt motifs and rhymes: shared features and similar silhouettes of root systems for the sake of a moment of immersion in the river of ideas, which flows in such a predictable channel that it is as though the myths of six continents were Paleolithic bone armguards from different parts of the world, their ornaments sometimes almost identical; creation myths and the dying-and-rising god repeated in Mesoamerica, Europe, and Ancient Greece, as though the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, resembling Chichén Itzá, the earthen giants of Mississippian culture, and the burial mounds of the Han dynasty, were making visible the common source of the first dispersals. To seize that moment before it all crumbles in one’s hands from differences of viewpoint, writing systems, and visions of the future, because unity always leans toward disintegration, just as ruins lean toward disappearance and civilizations toward decline, yet the moment of “feeling the channel” is priceless, like awareness and acceptance of the continuity of the Polesian landscape and space beyond the conventions of roads and routes.
Comparative studies solve some problems and create others, generally working effectively only by “freezing” the phenomena under study, taking a slice, and studying growth rings on a cut tree.
The comparative method runs up against the position of the observer, the scale of comparison, and the impossibility, without AGI, of taking into account a large number of parameters in comparison, so “clean” laboratory conditions are impossible to achieve. It is like quantum physics: someone burrows so deeply into it that they arrive at the conclusion that the universe is a simulation and existence is illusory, but what the fuck difference does that make if after being wounded you have to strain not to lose consciousness, and a “pencil” shell from a Grad gives you a headache all the way to nausea even if you managed to hide?
So l’histoire croisée and transfert culturel are wonderful, but I mean the color riot: softened rules, where the shape of individual details is sacrificed to the grace of the whole. It is like throwing a party: micro-control matters when selecting the guests, but then everyone starts chatting and off we go, and controlling that is fucking cringe, because the chaos was the essence of the party to begin with. And these notes are a party, where the guests-details, guests-myths, and guests-motifs are carefully chosen, and then, well, forgive me — let’s dance.
The rhymes of motifs and myths help imagine landscapes from another angle, like updated data on the movement of the galaxy, which not only spins like a whirlpool but also amusingly waves its “arms” up and down like a jellyfish.
As a result of this mythopoetic disco, I have managed to identify certain regularities in how the cherished space is perceived: a sacred place, terra incognita, is never empty, and the imagination needs a patch of the unknown; hence the tendency of imagination and memory to multiply the Zone and its jungles from the era of first contact; the desire to expand space inward, into the layers of the mythic heart beneath the topographic shirt. I have identified the indigenous refusal of the cooling pond’s draining and the conversion of bog and land for the sake of making space continuous; the perception of even streams as psychic barriers, but not of man-made canals, as though pilgrim souls were tied specifically to the natural hydrosphere.
This is not nostalgia or eco-protest, but an embedding, a merger with the personal locus amoenus of the noughts and the tens, growing into a sphere of mixed realities, where physical reality is taken into account only to avoid misunderstandings, being merely the upper layer, like the General Staff map above the colorful canvas of myth beneath it.
The motifs of drying, refusal, disappearance, germinalness (boulders that have not yet become stone idols), Le Clézio’s ecstatic universals about the “forest of the world’s creation” and the “landscape waiting precisely for them,” the effect of first contact with the abandoned, descriptions of Kyiv’s ruins from Plano Carpini to the beginning of the noughts as our Arthuriana, and the crucial importance of Hunter Thompson’s sitting in a place until madness in order to know its essence — a short list of ingredients for deeper immersion.
And one should not underestimate the Chornobyl alcohol-psychosis and the morning torments of a hangover, because this is a form of the classic dying-and-birth of a god.
Bodies in the grass unable to move — absolute purification and the embodiment of initiation rites, ayahuasca, and first sex in American Pie.
“Basically a renaissance painting.”
A ritual of gorging on toxic substances in order to be reborn, shedding the skins of a thousand old skins.
Thompson’s violence against the landscape is crucial for understanding the Zone and pilgrimages: beating a Hawaiian pier with a club, the island itself as an appearance of the giant demiurge from Easter Island in the act of destroying-creating the world, resembles vandalism and pilgrims throwing bathtubs out of windows, the “pointless” toppling of railway stops, and methodical attempts to chop through… a rail with a huge axe — an approach to the primal form of the omnipotent creator-demiurge (the pilgrim feels like the only being in the Zone and therefore omnipotent), sits there until madness (the demiurge wanders the primal cosmos forever), and so begins to destroy the world out of boredom because he is locked in it for eternity, and from this destruction the new world, that is, our world, is born.
This text is also destruction: of the previous idea of the Zone, where something drifted around about Prometheus on a legal excursion and some local lore, but mostly the pilgrim who painted the “Pripyat” stele or threw a bathtub out of a window did not think about the deep symbolism of the act, while when you do such things understanding the subtext, they bring much more pleasure.
If Stalking the Atomic City was the answer to the question “Why do you go there?”, then Mythogeography answers the eternal “What meanings do you put into it?” But I do not put them in. They are already there. The continuum of motifs, historical and mythological, has already put them there. I see them and retell them, read the map for you: where the bog is, where the dirt road is, and where the village that burned five years ago is, and where we are not sleeping overnight. It is a process. It simply is: a lush Tree of Life that I methodically grow where nothing was expected except death.
Only after years of contact with the Zone, after “discovering” the dark patches of the unexplored, fleeing into them and reinterpreting them, do you begin to value terra incognita for its own sake. You carefully forget it so as to return freshly. Just as hard, you strive to forget it as you once strove to explore it, so that the black and sticky patch may grow again on your mythic map, so that you may plunge into it, freshly, without studying it, wrap yourself in the cocoon of its eternity, as though this boisterous party with its noisy Boschian guests beneath the shirt of topography had been only so that silence and darkness might take me.
Cover me with the heart-shaped blanket of the last scraps of the unknown, which I spent so many years opening, opened, and tried to open.
***
The era in question is Jules Verne’s age, when ancient temples and high-mountain fortresses peered out from the bushes: centuries of oblivion suddenly opened up, and alongside them lay a valley of abandonment, overgrown roads, and bridges fallen into ravines.
When the first Europeans after the conquistadors were forcing their way through the Andes with machetes, life in postcolonial Mexico, with the draining of Texcoco, was in full swing on the territory of Tenochtitlan.
That is why the Incas: because of the silence of ruins spanning hundreds of years, because Machu Picchu is Pripyat, and the Urubamba Valley is a gigantic Zone all around it.
Among the thunderous discoveries of Egyptology, the recovery of Ashurbanipal’s library, and Homeric Troy, it is the Incas that matter most, because their fortresses did not sink underground but remained standing, wrapped in vines and ferns. Even the conquistadors did not find them.
Only later did Humboldt undertake a renewed journey, armed not with weapons but with crates of scientific instruments. The Aristotle of the nineteenth century left behind the expansive work Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent in 1799–1804, and this very journey came to be called the “second discovery of America” — a scientific discovery.
Humboldt was interested in manuscripts and legends, as every researcher of the time was; he wanted everything at once, and then to found twenty new sciences. His contact with the Peruvian highlands is sporadic, but he gives us a crucial opening note about the magnificent Inca road by which we enter the magical valley of the abandoned:
“this route leads almost to Cuzco, is paved with hewn stone slabs, straight as an arrow. It can be compared with the best roads of Rome.” “The platform is situated so that a splendid view opens from it. Nearby there is a round disk of yellow metal; the Peruvians decorated it because they believed it symbolized the Sun. I sketched it.”
But the geology-absorbed Humboldt passed by the ruins that form the canon. He passed by them just as the German engineer Hermann Gohring did in late 1873, whose “Report to the Supreme Government of Peru on the Expedition to the Paucartambo Valley” contains the map
“Mapa de los Valles de Paucartambo, Lares, Ocobamba y la Quebrada del Vilconota Levantado por Herman Gohring Enginiero Estado, Cuzco, Diciembre 1874”
with the first mention of Machu Picchu and the very effect of a name, which hides what matters most. And the frontispiece resembles a rock veined with gold and blood, for which Francisco Pizarro once came to the Andes.
Gohring describes ancient towers, walls, and underground communications, but without missionary emotion, in the role of “engineer and colonial pragmatist.” Twenty-eight years before the first wall scribble and thirty-nine years before the “discovery” of Machu Picchu, he writes about it as something ordinary: “…the topographical position of the neighboring fortresses of Chuquillusc, Torontoy, or Picchu offers greater advantages…”
The first mention of ruins that are siblings to the Zone, from someone who passed by them tangentially.
Closer still came the French traveler Charles Wiener. From the outset, his relation to ruins carries the same ecstatic charge that Le Clézio gives to the Chichimecs’ discovery of the city:
“They were interested in everything except the traces of the past buried under the rubble of Peru’s dead cities. Quite naturally so, since the name ‘dead city,’ applied to the ancient populous cities of the Andean region, is more astonishingly apt than when applied to the remains of classical countries or the extinct cities of the European Middle Ages.
“In the beautiful words of Ludovico Ariosto, ‘death itself may give life,’ and indeed, just as there is an art of living, there is a certain art of dying, and that is what makes a person immortal.
“The natives of the Andean land did not know this art. They had the misfortune to become victims without the glory of martyrs.
“Therefore poetry did not descend upon their vast tomb, history did not lift the blood-stained veil of generations to revive the unknown past. Death took from the Peruvian man all rights, sparing him none of the cruelest: memory.
“Walk among Greek or Roman ruins, between the shattered columns of the forum, through the tiers of the amphitheater, beneath the galleries of the temple, and under the invigorating action of memory the ruins will rise again, the inhabitants of the past will bring them to life. The statues of gods and heroes will recite the verses of Homer, Virgil, and Horace.
“Everything reminds you of their activity; through their works you reap the fruits of ideas sown by the dead. What a striking difference between the immortal flame illuminating the centuries and the sun of the Incas, cruelly extinguished at the arrival of the Spanish cross!
“In the bare and monotonous galleries of the American cities of the past, in those silent houses, palaces without memory, temples without God, the spectator understands why so many scholars failed to find the secret of the Peruvian past. It is therefore important to fill this gap: to seek the elements for reconstructing the vanished world, to gather what survived volcanic shocks, atmospheric forces, and conquests; to collect carefully the legends that endured so many cataclysms — to fill the vast void in humanity’s memory.”
He too heard of Machu Picchu and searched for it, but passed by again. He was among the last to use drawings rather than photographs. The later discoverer, by contrast, left eloquent images, and that shift from drawing to photograph gave the discovery greater force. A drawing can always be embellished; a photograph, a hundred years ago, conveyed exactly what the researcher saw, even where imagination refused to believe.
***
As for the irony of passing tangentially by ruins, Wiener was surpassed only by Fray Sabate. Google is silent about this man, but not about his three-hundred-page folio Travel of the Fathers-Missionaries of the Monastery of Cuzco. There one discovers a Wilder-like Brother Juniper, for whom no broken bridge was ever found:
“…the enormous riches that these Mountains offer the traveler remain for those who wish to make use of them. With ambition I set out in search of more valuable treasures: thousands and thousands of people enclosed in savagery and separation from the true faith.”
Sabate dives into missionary projects, complains about tribes who pretend to be Christian for alms, about the burden of the portable altar, but he also adds a sense of doom, at times coming close to the level of Chornobyl pilgrimage:
“We were three poor believers, lacking means and facing a sad prospect. Our situation was analogous to that of the Apostle Paul, which in Acta Apostolorum is explained thus: ‘And now I, compelled by the Spirit, go to Jerusalem, not knowing all… there will happen to me what the Holy Spirit assures me of in all the cities, saying: in Jerusalem bonds and afflictions await me.’”
He embraced eternity and set out with arms spread wide, with a shotgun, a portable altar, and the knowledge that the journey might be his last. In this he strongly resembled the more famous David Livingstone.
Sabate goes to Urumbaba, which in Spanish is the astonishing Valle Sagrado de los Incas (“Sacred Valley of the Incas”).
He never found Machu Picchu, but he did have lunch right nearby.
He was not looking for it, but his text is steeped in mysticism, and the valley is full of ruins, such as the terraces of Moray, not to mention Inca roads. This is an eloquent encounter with the abandoned, priceless in the duality of Urumbaba-as-Zone and Machu Picchu-as-Pripyat:
“We find an ancient path, dating back to the times of the Incas, difficult to traverse, stretching until it meets a river, on the opposite bank of which another similar path can be seen… we had to ford it, climb a high rocky slope… cling to bushes and roots, exhaust ourselves, and climb steps that partly reached our waists.”
Cracks in the road and moss swallowing it narrow the route to a footpath; the kilometers of the road, with the force of textured ruins, remind you at every step: people had to pull back from here.
An abandoned Chornobyl railway.
One line is enough for the scale of collapse to speak more eloquently than descriptions of abandoned cities.
A structural ruin.
A weight equal to that of Machu Picchu, like the heart of an abandoned valley.
Frodo and Sam, Minas Morgul, but the stairs lead into a valley of appeasement, and into everything we love about Madeira, where waterfalls and jungles are of unearthly beauty.
“We arrived at a hacienda called Media-Naranja and on Sunday had the pleasure of celebrating Mass, consoling our hearts with spiritual aid.” “During the day we had enough time to contemplate the rarities that nature offers here, and we were astonished to see the difficulties that had to be overcome to clear a path in some places.”
This was right at the foot of Machu Picchu.
Fray Sabate saw the “lonely tower” thirty-seven years before Hiram Bingham recorded his discovery in "Explorations in the Highlands of Peru" and the whole world learned of it. The model for Indiana Jones, then director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition, left a vivid and striking testimony of first contact with the abandoned and the majestic:
Fray Sabate saw the “lonely tower” thirty-seven years before Hiram Bingham recorded his discovery in "Explorations in the Highlands of Peru" and the whole world learned of it. The model for Indiana Jones, then director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition, left a vivid and striking testimony of first contact with the abandoned and the majestic:
was in July, 1911, that we first entered that marvelous canyon of the Urubamba, where the river escapes from the cold regions near Cuzco by tearing its way through gigantic mountains of granite.”
“In the variety of its charms and the power of its spell, I know of no place in the world which can compare with it. Not only has it great snow peaks looming above the clouds more than two miles overhead; gigantic precipices of many-colored granite rising sheer for thousands of feet above the foaming, glistening, roaring rapids; it has also, in striking contrast, orchids and tree ferns, the delectable beauty of luxurious vegetation, and the mysterious witchery of the jungle.”
Discovery was helped by chance.
The expedition stopped to rest and, almost like in Manuscript 512, came into contact with locals who recommended the ruins on the ridge.
Rumors and tales about the fortress had long seemed uninteresting to Peruvian researchers: Peruvians adore inventions. But when Bingham showed local scholars the photographs, they did not believe their eyes: they had always passed by, even knew them on the summit, but thought it was only a tower.
Scattered reports by mountain scouts and locals suggest that Machu Picchu was visited sporadically even earlier, and in that it resembles metalheads making their way into Pripyat.
Below is Bingham, reduced by me to the essential, on the flash of discovery:
“For an hour and twenty minutes we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes hanging on by the tips of our fingers. Here and there, a primitive ladder made from the roughly hewn trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have proved to be an impassable cliff. In another place the slope was covered with slippery grass where it was hard to find either handholds or footholds. The guide said that there were lots of snakes here. The humidity was great, the heat was excessive, and we were not in training.”
“Two pleasant Indian farmers, Richarte and Alvarez, had chosen this eagle’s nest for their home. They said they had found plenty of terraces here on which to grow their crops and they were usually free from undesirable visitors. They did not speak Spanish, but through Sergeant Carrasco I learned that there were more ruins ‘a little farther along.’”
We too came right up against it.
The moment about “locals using Inca aqueducts, growing food on terraces, and not being thrilled by visitors after whom the state would inevitably come with taxes and obligations” is what exploded in mass culture. But it does not convey everything. Bingham does:
“The Indians said there were two paths to the outside world. Of one we had already had a taste; the other, they said, was more difficult—a perilous path down the face of a rocky precipice on the other side of the ridge. It was their only means of egress in the wet season, when the bridge over which we had come could not be maintained. I was not surprised to learn that they went away from home only ‘about once a month.’
Richarte told us that they had been living here four years. It seems probable that, owing to its inaccessibility, the canyon had been unoccupied for several centuries, but with the completion of the new government road settlers began once more to occupy this region. In time somebody clambered up the precipices and found on the slopes of Machu Picchu, at an elevation of 9000 feet above the sea, an abundance of rich soil conveniently situated on artificial terraces, in a fine climate. Here the Indians had finally cleared off some ruins, burned over a few terraces, and planted crops of maize, sweet and white potatoes, sugar cane, beans, peppers, tree tomatoes, and gooseberries.”
“Crossing these terraces, I entered the untouched forest beyond, and suddenly found myself in a maze of beautiful granite houses! They were covered with trees and moss and the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bamboo thickets and tangled vines, could be seen, here and there, walls of white granite ashlars most carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together.”
“I climbed a marvelous great stairway of large granite blocks, walked along a pampa where the Indians had a small vegetable garden, and came into a little clearing. Here were the ruins of two of the finest structures I have ever seen in Peru. Not only were they made of selected blocks of beautifully grained white granite; their walls contained ashlars of Cyclopean size, ten feet in length, and higher than a man. The sight held me spellbound.”
“These ruins have no other name than that of the mountain on the slopes of which they are located. Had this place been occupied uninterruptedly, like Cuzco and Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu would have retained its ancient name, but during the centuries when it was abandoned, its name was lost.”
“From a crude scrawl on the walls of one of the finest buildings, we learned that the ruins were visited in 1902 by Lizarraga, lessee of the lands immediately below the bridge of San Miguel.”
“It was this new road which brought Richarte, Alvarez, and their enterprising friends into this little-known region, gave them the opportunity of occupying the ancient terraces of Machu Picchu, which had lain fallow for centuries, encouraged them to keep open a passable trail over the precipices, and made it feasible for us to reach the ruins. It was this new road which offered us in 1911 a virgin field between Ollantaytambo and Huadquiña and enabled us to learn that the Incas, or their predecessors, had once lived here in the remote fastnesses of the Andes, and had left stone witnesses of the magnificence and beauty of their ancient civilization, more interesting and extensive than any which have been found since the days of the Spanish Conquest of Peru.”
By an irony of fate, Machu Picchu resembles Pripyat also in this: before its death it became a Temple of the Sun. Its last inhabitants were women, the Virgins of the Sun, sacred priestesses whom the Incas hid high in the mountains from the conquistadors. Like the priests of the Caucasian peoples, they had to remain constantly in the Temple, bound to the place so that the Sun would not go out.
Mesoamerican Prometheuses.
***
It is worth turning back from foundational acts and city-founding charters, from conquistador reports of violence and plunder, and from descriptions of exotic countries by expeditionary armies — to unfurl the panoramic lens and look at the diorama from a distance.
Can I say that I left my own testimony?
A testimony of first contact with the abandoned.
Did I join the layers of the past, which the jagged wind of time scatters, and all we can do is try to catch them in time to read them before the next gust tears the pages from our hands and carries them away forever, like the wax impressions of the inscription beneath the mysterious statue in the Azores, which the Portuguese made in the sixteenth century but could never read, and left no testimony about.
To leave testimony. And I do leave one:
“15 November 2011. Yakovets Forestry Station, Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, near the abandoned village of Denysovychi, which had not been visited before.
Night. Two hundred meters from the Belarusian border. An imperial stone-laid road, whose sinkholes suddenly reach knee depth in the middle of the night, with a worn track in the grass beside it.
At the rest stop, two of them smoke in silence, while the third studies the sky and talks about astrophotography.
In a couple of hours they will enter the village like frightened geese. In their mythogeography, the farther you go in this direction, the more relics of the old Zone you can encounter: smugglers, bandits, and Belarusians who will certainly ‘grab you and take you with them,’ into the embrace of regimes with utopian sausage abundance on grocery shelves.
They are freezing in the ‘open’ village, which in principle is no different from the others. They spend a long time taking staged photographs that are supposed to ‘enter history’ — history no one needs, which time and the failure to pay for a stalker forum domain will take away. In the end, they accidentally find a cast-iron stove in a shack near the forestry tower, and while dinner cooks over a fire made from the fence, while bones warm and flies wake up in the warmth of the wagon, one of the men spends a long time and carefully, with a huge knife, carving into the table the inscription: ‘Glory to the anarcho-vandal detachment named after Major Nemchytsky.’
The autograph may seem like meaningless gibberish, and in principle it is, but it is the first ‘autograph’ that belongs to the age of naturalists rather than conquistadors or metal scrappers, so I will decode it so that it remains in the history of the geographical discoveries of the last scraps of our terra incognita.
It is not clear who this ‘Major Nemchytsky’ is; Google and Wikipedia are silent about him, and the capitalized ‘Major’ suggests that this is not a rank, but something more. According to one of the first discoverers, who invented this ‘detachment,’ one evening policemen detained him in Kyiv for drinking alcohol and took him to the station to draw up an administrative offense report. They brought him under the precinct, but out of it burst a dead-drunk police major in a good mood, looked at the detainees, said, ‘Eh? What? Let the boys go, Major Nemchytsky is celebrating today!’ and ran off about his business. The boys were let go, and ‘Major Nemchytsky’ became a local symbol of the Chornobyl police’s “whatever” attitude, so inattentive that your humble servant and those like him always behaved beyond the barbed wire with maximum ease.
So the autograph contains no heavy semantic load, there are no seeds in it from which a national idea will sprout, but it was important to decode it. Let this testimony remain in history, like the fragmentary notes of conquistadors, bandeirantes, and followers of Alexander von Humboldt.
I returned to Denysovychi in November as well, seven years later. The inscription on the wooden table had survived; I placed my hand on it and held it there for a long time while it warmed my soul, like the first scribbles in Machu Picchu in 1902, about which Hiram Bingham joyfully wrote in his diary.
But my testimony would not be complete without first contact with Pripyat, and although pilgrims were by then already often going into the city, the phenomenon still remained a lacuna for a handful of enthusiasts, not to mention that your own personal emotions of first contact are as valuable as the notes of those gentlemen in cork helmets. So I testify:
“After two days of wandering through the Zone, failed fords, route detours, and wet feet, I and two other pilgrims approached the abandoned city of Pripyat.
Under the clouds, darkness was impenetrable, but, afraid of possible capture, we did not switch on even a small light or flashlight. I entered the city for the first time on the night of 11–12 November 2010 near the ‘Start’ shop and then walked another kilometer along Academician Kurchatov Street to fetch water at the pier.
The rows of abandoned high-rises loomed like sheer cliffs, as if I were moving through an Inca mountain valley, a gorge through which there was only one road, and truly only one, because I did not know another at the time. Dying of exhaustion, we dragged ourselves along, and twenty concrete blocks to the pier seemed like two hundred, three thousand, a million stone palaces, a multiplied labyrinth of Kyiv dormitory districts, the Parthenon and the Acropolis of Athens all at once; onto them I laid all my projections of infinity until Kurchatov Street stretched like a string into eternity, and we on it shrank to atomic size. On the eternal road, after fifty kilometers in a day, the last meters are measured only in astronomical units.
The pounding of looters in the five-story blocks frightened us, piercing sounds from the past, echoes of the conquistador Zone, which was convulsing away at the very moment when a generation of young naturalists, loaded with camera gear, whisky, and sleeping mats, was already flying in.
Before the darkness of broken sleep took me, I remember the wet stones of the pier, the time-eaten steps down to the convulsions of cold water, the silhouettes of three slender Pripyat ‘candles,’ and the same long, dark concrete stairs rising into the sky of the best apartments. There we lit a fire from parquet just to warm ourselves as best we could, and I fell asleep with my back against an icy wall.
I closed my eyes, and Pripyat took me.”
Markiyan Kamysh
25 October — 3 December 2024
Translation assisted by ChatGPT (OpenAI), GPT-5.4 Thinking, on March 2025. Editorial intervention: none.