Triptych

Escape

I wake up on Madeira.

On sun-blistered stone along a deserted pier in the provincial part of the island. Before me lies the Atlantic as a cosmos of soothing emptiness and meditative gradients in every shade of salt known to the world.

Behind me rises an abandoned boat-repair workshop, or some primordial fish-processing plant — a rusted hangar with nothing in common with rivieras or beaches.

I am on the outskirts of nothing, in the middle of nowhere. Where medieval geography ended and mythogeography began. On one of the legendary “Islands of the Blessed,” already mentioned by Plutarch — islands that migrated endlessly through European cartography, changing shape and coordinates, accumulating new details. Appearing here and there with each redrawing, through transmission errors and through the varying visions of this or that cartographer as to what the “Islands of the Blessed” actually were: a mythological hypostasis of paradise, a land of milk rivers and cheese shores and everything else we pack into that chant: there-there-there, only not where we are, murmuring Okean Elzy under our breath.

I chose this scrap of land, lost in the heart of the Atlantic, deliberately. The islands of the archipelago were endowed with a legendarium proper to the very idea of “the edge” as a place where monsters live. Here the mass of mythogeographic echoes reaches not only toward the Zone or Polissia, but toward the very imagination of all Ukraine as a European periphery.

And so I sleep on the hot stone of a nameless pier, with a bottle of wine nearby and a piece of Portuguese flatbread. This is my longest pilgrimage. My absolute escape. An escape even from Switzerland — which itself had been an escape, because now, when you leave Ukraine, it is always an escape.

From the salty, empty heart of the Atlantic my Mythogeography began — back when, in Switzerland, I paused to write it. It began from the edge of the oikoumene opposite Chornobyl: from the stone statue of the Carthaginian sun god pointing west, found by the Portuguese on the Azores nearly six hundred years ago. Madeira lies not far from the Azorean archipelago, but I left the Azores for last: imagination must preserve sections of terra incognita veiled beneath a blanket at the edges of the map, so they keep amplifying and provoking the ceaseless act of redrawing, of inscribing the most secret. Launching the process of mythogeographization, leaving the unexplored as a goal, searing it into the heart.

That is why Madeira, not the Azores, a month ago. That is why Chornobyl-2, not Pripyat, later, on my return.

In recent years Madeira has deservedly earned the mythic tag of the “European Hawaii” — steep coasts, dense jungles, “paradise” waterfalls, “breath-stealing” rocky peaks. Unfortunately, I had neither the resources, nor the time, nor the means for admiration.

I was looking for ruins.

On the mythic map of its lovers, the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is simultaneously an island and an earthly disk. One of the popular topo-maps of the Zone from the 2010s speaks eloquently of this: the inner space is left light, while the world beyond its borders is darkened as insignificant — echoing the mass-culture myth of world-construction, variants of which existed among the peoples of India, China, and even the Americas: the earthly disk on the back of a giant turtle. Not to mention the image of the island as the only thing in the Atlantic forest worth attention.

Madeira, in fact, has much in common with our jungles: a history of mass deforestation and even more massive canal building, the first of them almost five centuries old. Irrigation, clear-cutting, jungle, peripherality — an eloquent list that transforms this distant scrap of land into a harmonious counter-parallel, an anti-world to our overgrown one.

But this time, what mattered to me was the most important thing.

First contact with ruins.

The classic story of “sailors who landed on an island and found magnificent ruins of a Golden Age” — variants of which I hunted down for the stained glass of Mythogeography in chroniclers of different eras: contact with the abandoned Buenos Aires, mythical Brazilian settlements “rediscovered” by random gold-seekers, studies of an abandoned Inca valley — all these testimonies of first contact with the stones of ancient epochs speak of one and the same thing.

Of the aching, trembling encounter with the Past.

A Past from which protrude the defining buds of trauma, memory, and nostalgia. Bookmarks from which later the flowers of our self-definition explode, laying out life routes, determining the trajectories of destinies and everything that ignites the fire of plots and motivations. Of course, no one has abolished freedom — one can turn away from those paths, but the magnetism of their pull is harder to overcome than earthly gravity.

In the autumn of 2024, for Mythogeography, I wrote that “…descriptions of ruins are the main thread binding our land: from Plano Carpini’s testimony that after the Mongol invasion only two hundred houses remained around Saint Sophia in Kyiv, all the way to the film chronicles of the Chornobyl disaster, the pilgrim photos of Pripyat and the panoramas of war-eaten cities that will linger long in gray zones, like the districts of Famagusta in Cyprus.

These memories are our Arthuriana: ruins of something ancient, more magnificent, greater than what came after. Four hundred years ago the vaulting of the Golden Gate in Kyiv still survived — a symbol of antiquity more eloquent than the Colosseum or aqueducts. Later drawings reduce the gate to a heap of stone. Those two images inspired me for a decade to photograph Chornobyl frescoes, slowly collapsing until they laid bare the concrete wall.

And yet, the history of ruins is only beginning, no matter how badly I long to be the author of its final note.”

And so, on Madeira, I walked through villages and mountain valleys, carefully memorizing battered old cars staring mournfully into the Ocean; lonely columns and facades held together by fern and good faith. All remnants-and-leftovers, in the attempt to restore the sensation of first contact with ruins of the medieval Portuguese who once landed on these islands: at the end of the world, as it was for them then and as it is for me now.

I ritually placed my hand on the salt-eaten bodies of the ruins there.

Ritually, yes. Because rituals are multiplying in our life. Because Polesian Zen is also about them — as elements, prophecies, and the ecstatic language of manifestos; as a tearing-open of the chest beside the whisper of prayers, confessions, and the thunder-voiced silence of contemplating minefields.

At the end of that overlong June day, blistered by the buds of summer and smoothed by the Atlantic wind, exhausted and hollowed out, I shuffle toward the city.

Toward the island capital, Funchal.

At last it appears to me in the flickering vision of Favre light — fires in the distance, cacti in the foreground — bursting from behind a mountain turn, suddenly, the way Los Angeles lunges toward you in cinema panoramas.

I drag myself toward the city on the opposite edge of my inner Polesian map. I move forward with the heavy knowledge that I have twenty euros in my pocket and nowhere to sleep. I move, understanding that my escape is absolute — but that only after such an absolute, spatial escape does returning make sense.

And so I returned.

I listened to the silence of the holy synod of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines
guarding in unison the eloquent hush;
they thought I had fallen silent out of respect.
Well, the mines in the Zone are recent.

I memorized their metal buds,
from which flowers will yet explode.
“Explosion” is the form of existence of thickets
if you look long enough and accelerate hard.

Not everyone has that much patience,
so fast food was added
for the uninitiated.

An ultra-fast form of decay
for the impatient,
accelerated visualization
with a lethal nuance.

But I returned.
I have enough patience.
Returned to the Zone,
to its rhythms and breaths.

She is so beautiful.
Do you see her?
I — see.

27.06.2025
Chornobyl Zone — Kyiv

Return

We eternally “bury” the Zone, commenting on its transformations. We say “it no longer exists,” marking with that powerful incantation the annual rings of a massive trunk.

I stopped saying that long ago.

The Zone has resurrected.

The pandemic, and now the mines, return us to the truth — to the turning of the “zeroes,” when it was still a clot of warm wax on terra incognita, myths, and secrecy. A place of solstice and super-slow explosions of lush acacias, whose epicenter was the little town of Chornobyl-2, which then still symbolized estrangement and silence, which Pripyat had already lost.

It was that town I chose as my point of return to the Zone, three and a half years after my last pilgrimage.

But when approaching the land of my heart, I no longer recognize even the point of departure — the bus station in Kyiv. At the height of the summer solstice I return to the port of departure and cannot recognize it, as though I crawl toward old altars and they have been civilized to the grinding of teeth, to the point where there is no strength left even to serve the rituals of antiquity.

After the previous renovations, archaic pirozhki stalls had been replaced by neat kiosks armored in plastic, and only the vibe remained unchanged: in a capital-periphery, even in 2021, you felt yourself at a provincial bus station, on the shore of the Polesian Sea, a sailor with a backpack in woodland camouflage before a leap into the unknown, with a compass and a sheaf of laminated topographic maps in your pocket.

Now the bus station is alien, like a movie star after bad plastic surgery.

The piercing whiteness of the waiting hall does not quite reach utopian futurism, but it does pass for a café in a near-center district. Euro-renovation, neon coffee machines, total contactless pay — far more sensible than the bus station in Geneva.

But at the ticket window they know nothing of the minibus to the village of my start-destination; they sell no tickets either. There are no prices for it even on the printouts of old-school Charon-taxi drivers in Ivankiv. Over these years I have forgotten the names of some villages and, for now, prefer not to remember, stretching the period of acrobatic operations of memory with the half-forgotten, adored space.

I stand silently for a minute, as if honoring the dead. I hang there confused at the ticket window, just as several years ago I did before the gates of a brand-new residential complex on the site of the abandoned Kuibyshev furniture factory in Kyiv. I had gone there after a break to listen to the hum of planes over Zhulyany, and there were no ruins left — everything had been overbuilt. And there I was, captivated by the speed of the world, gaping before the gate in all my retrograde Mercury.

Now again. Well: there is no bus station.

Good that the Zone remained.

She lets me in.

I seep through the barbed wire without a sense of demarcations, Rubicons, or tachycardia — the border has long been a gradient. I do not bad-trip even when I shoulder thick spider webs in the forest. I do not look under my feet: the act of return occurs in another dimension. The mines, of course, have not gone anywhere. They are silent. I am silent too, listening to their silence. For two hours I listen at a moss-overgrown, abandoned bus stop — I hurry to a meeting with the sky. Ahead: its gradients from the top of the Chornobyl-2 Antennas.

As are the gradients of return.

The trees beneath the Antenna have leapt upward over these years, but do not hold together; they branch out, entangling and uniting in a sudden duet of iron and wood. The ancient ladders into the sky-forest have preserved their amplitudes of swaying. Thoughts, as you climb, are still interrupted by the wind; in power it still competes with the gusts of the Carpathian ridges.

From above, the Zone always looks the same, even if where forest once stood now flutter eloquent burn scars. It reveals itself primarily in details, approaches, deformations, renovations, the tiniest fractions of crumbling, of flaking-away — and the only significant change in the panoramic profile is the broken dragon backbone of the railway bridge over the Pripyat.

Whether you go to the gym or not, the climb to the Antenna exhausts equally. Whether you run or not, fifty-some kilometers, even with a feather on your back, is given in seven labors. You give yourself to the Zone completely — exactly as much as she asks.

The little town by the Antennas has been retaken by jungle. In an era of green de-occupation, its streets have turned into rivers of fern, acacia, and flowers, and its lanes into streams of moss-grass.

The wave of fear of mines has washed away the beaten paths of the tourist assault years, to the point where it is difficult for me to break through to that same abandoned house. The last time it was like this was a hundred thousand years ago. Two hundred.

In the same apartment as always, I open the balcony, letting sunlight flood the dusty room. I am immediately washed by waves of birdsong.

I pour a shot for the Polissian spirits, break bread for them. I set out sweets on the windowsill, as one would set a jug for ancestors on Didays. I set them and again listen to the silence, which sounds entirely different.

Later I will pour half the bottle onto the earth and wait for the liquor to sink in, for the boggy soil to loosen and take the offering, the way it opens each autumn and drags to the otherworldly serpents and insects.

I carefully complete all rituals and return back. Farewell, my land — forgive the years of silence and the long wait for our meeting.

Forgive me.

I will not promise anymore.

I leave. I return. I go back quietly, like a mouse, stepping cautiously, without stamping.

Silently, as I came.

Beyond the piercing calm of the town, the Zone has grown more fortifications. Threatening and majestic sand labyrinths, embanked and wrapped in concertina wire wound around freshly felled trunks. There are more checkpoints, outposts, and listening posts — but what matters also remains: the swift rusted spruce of the Antennas, shattered villages, sun-swollen ribbons of rural asphalt occasionally shaded by the explosions of acacia crowns; remnants of relic road infrastructures: all the bridges with striped sides, the concrete roadside posts, and the giants of the power lines, under which in the height of a many-starred night you respectfully stop for a smoke — to listen to the crackle of whispers, to brand into memory the majestic darkness-and-silhouette. You stop even if you quit smoking long ago. Year after year you walk, writing different things while making the same photos, as if afraid to miss something — shooting testimonies from rust and creaking iron with a multi-year, cross-examining gaze.

— Modus operandi?
— The unhurried dying and the eternal sudden resurrection.

The Zone releases me as easily as she let me in.

She releases me under a night rushing in with a boisterous wind, distant barking, and the lights of a village whose closeness promises a future Charon-in-a-taxi and, for my meager anti-budget, at least some lures of civilization.

Even in darkness I quickly find a hole in the barbed wire by touch, but, almost emerging, catch my sleeve. I choose to believe it is a hint of “not for the last time.”

With these mines, the stakes have grown — but in my personal history, my literature sprouting from pilgrimages like plants breaking through concrete and asphalt, to return like this was necessary. Not to “feel,” but in order to be.

It is a deeply personal, ritualized act of self-intervention.

An act of return.

“Return” is, in general, a supremely important word and phenomenon of our time, which will yet become defining in the future.

Return is even more than an eternal myth-plot — it is a natural process, like magnetism or gravity. And so, “after everything,” everything will return to its circle, to the extent possible after trillions of decibels of explosions, tens of thousands of hearts cut short, and wholly apocalyptic destructions.

Return will yet become the common denominator for Ukrainians. Return, re-finding, rebirth. Despite the fact that before it seemed unthinkable.

23 June 2025
Chornobyl-2 — Kyiv

Acceptance

I cross a destroyed bridge over the Uzh in Polissia.

On both sides, the silver channel of the river glitters, and the floodplains drown in green. After the blast, there is a sinkhole in the gray hide of the bridge, so I have to descend to the water, then climb again.

Many bridges of the Kyiv region have been restored and no longer remind one of war. The bridges of the Zone carefully preserve memory. With broken spines they speak without words, photos, or video chronicles. With maimed bodies they address us in the language of ruins — the language in which the Zone spoke long ago and will go on speaking, preserving layer after layer of destruction, offering up heated fragments to lift bruises and record testimonies.

The bridge over the Uzh in the village of Cherevach is a stone golem, whose torn body was once held together by real magic. Part of it still lies in the water right where I descended to drink. Recently I could not even approach it — only whispered greetings with the current.

The Paryshiv bridge has frozen in the textural grandeur of ruin, in an endless asphalt stretch into the distance of the floodplains of Mother-Pripyat. As a torn-open ruin it runs beyond the horizon, into the right atrium of the geographical heart of the Marsh. I was lucky to see Paryshiv a year and a half ago, and this emblematic destruction condemns the Left Bank to a new isolation.

The broken backbone of the railway bridge has so far revealed itself to me only from the top of the Antennas — the only change in the panoramic profile of the Zone that strikes the eye at once. A couple of times I already wandered through mined sections via thickets in places where Zone security had warned me of special mine density. Yet even so, I still do not dare to approach the railway bridge and the Pripyat channel. Once I spoke with a sapper who had mined the Zone after the Russian retreat. Well-read, restrained, cultured — of all the trash he had to work with during the war he spoke as of routine; but when it came to the Zone, his face changed, he repeated “hell” a couple of times and said he had never seen anything like it, showing how densely minefields in his phone overlapped one another.

Where bridges once joined pieces of land in the country of the marsh, stitching them together and nullifying water barriers — they now serve as separators. Where there was a shortcut, now there is a sudden lengthening. Where there was a passage, now there are military blockades.

There are no more stalkers.

I am the only one left.

All routes are mine, all ruins, all mines.

Here I am, crossing the destroyed bridge over the Uzh.

Soon they will take me in.

Everyone was calm. Only a military counterintelligence officer lunged at me from somewhere with a baton and pressed hard, sincerely unable to understand what I was doing here. He kept wondering why I had no radiometer, stubbornly calling it a dosimeter. I did not correct him.

“Why the hell are you climbing in here?!”

Indeed.

Why do you write letters without hoping for a reply? Why did you not flee Kyiv? Why do you eternally get involved in unprofitable projects doomed to go bankrupt? Why did you return to Ukraine? It’s “illogical.”

Indeed.

Do not look for logic in love — it is not there and will not be. There are only splashes, flashes, and accelerated heartbeats, more precious than the ticking of all Swiss watches in the world.

After the sections “Escape” and “Return” follows “Acceptance.”

Acceptance of the Zone with all checkpoints, soldiers, and mines. Acceptance of it in whatever hypostasis it appears to you: at its best or worst, letting you in or not letting you out. Whether you sit atop the Antenna and slip away quietly or sit for the third hour straight surrounded by soldiers under a barrage of questions whose answers you still remember from the era “Before the Full-Scale War,” like cheat codes for Vice City.

The answers have not changed. They could not have changed.

Without the police ritual of drawing up an administrative offense report, the final comeback into the Zone could not have occurred. It would not have been complete without the deranged procedure involving all departments, somewhat astonished and at first caught off-guard by the appearance of this new-old beast in these territories.

Well, the cycle is complete.

For some, “got caught” is a pretext for desacralization. These people simply have not yet understood: the baby teeth of bravado fall out in the first couple of years, and the mature perception of the Zone forms only around the fifth year of walking — a true master’s degree.

A higher education in sensing place and space.

It’s as if for the first five years you only climb to the summit from which river overflows and green bird-valleys become visible in panorama. Later still — you perceive all experiences of the Zone outside the prism of judgment: you feel like a stone that the storming river of time cannot wear down. A stone that stubbornly keeps sticking out in place while the color of the guards’ camouflage changes from gray pixel to green, while wrecked machinery disappears and appears, and bridges — like smashed china sets — explode into shards only to reassemble.

Through all details and transformations, one thing remains unchanged.

The sense of belonging.

Rootedness, acceptance of the Zone and of yourself in it, coexistence in harmony with every scrap of land, even after all deformations. You even stop mourning the loss of its former shape — you rejoice only in the new shape-formation you were destined to witness, because the layers have grown and the space has become more complex in the fourth dimension.

My pilgrimages today had something of Saint Augustine about them: they simply had to be this way when I was left alone. I walked as if there were no soldiers, checkpoints, deployments, embankments, fortifications. There was only me and the Zone. The only question was when physical reality would crash head-on into my imagined, mythogeographic construct. I was most interested in the sparks of this terrifying collision — they are like new subatomic particles discovered in a collider after protons are accelerated to near the speed of light.

After “Escape” and “Return” follows “Acceptance.”

And so they accepted me.

“Deranged.”

Just look at Kaidanovsky’s hero.

Be that as it may, I was in Polisske again.

The eaten brick fangs of absolute ruins breathe their last and still refuse to crumble, dead-stitched with green threads and lotus-lily lianas. The irrepressible riot of forest keeps them aloft, locks them in a cocoon of levitation, even though the textures have already fallen away and you cannot guess what was before you: a hotel, a bus station, a shop?

The faces of the stones here are depersonalized, wiped clean — the river of time wears down even capital brick. The jungle has taken Polisske, buried it under itself, and — as n-teen years ago — this is a journey into the past and the future at once. It eloquently hints at what Pripyat and the whole Zone could become if abandoned after the war.

Polisske has always been the symbol of total ruin — those are by now stable synonym-words — but now time has revealed another layer: often the riot of green dominates the ancient brick so strongly that visually it pushes the moment of resettlement hundreds of years into the past, and all shattered facades that from time to time stand alone among the thickets resemble the Arthuriana and the ruins of the Golden Gate somewhere in Khmelnytskyi region.

Huge, not signs but billboards — “Mine Danger” with laconic, capacious warnings — decorate the highways toward Ovruch and look surreal against the teeth-grindingly positive selfie-signs “I love Luhovyky,” “I love Krasyatychi,” which themselves contrast with squares frozen in the “two-thousands.”

Closer to the Zone border the billboards change to even more eloquent red “Mines!” signs along the roads, and in places — to concrete distances to minefields and reminders of the ban on approaching closer than one hundred meters without a full set of protective gear.

The sinusoid of euphoria of mine-explosive and military-reception lotteries rang against the bottom. It is good that I activated not a mine but the Armed Forces. Yet even after all the inspections and interrogations, a little emerald of Polisske stayed with me: pure, unstained, green amber of sun-jungles, drowned through and through in them, woven from them as well. And today, falling asleep in Kyiv, I embrace it, press it close to my heart. I sleep curled into a ball on an island in the middle of nowhere of my inner Zone.

Of my eternal escape.

Of my eternal return.

The Zone has changed. Even herds of Przewalski’s horses are met in different places now.

The sparks of collision between reality and mythogeography have revealed a new subatomic particle, and as often happens in the history of scientific discovery, chance helped. When I was detained, they accidentally seated me to wait exactly in the place where I once loved so much to meditate, passing through Polisske on the road to the center of the Zone.

They sat me down dot for dot.

Placed me on that same patch, in that knot of space-time, shot me into the coordinates of super-deep meditation, threw me into a well of the past without knowing it themselves. And sitting there, demonstrating my extremely modest dry ration from my backpack to the video of a police bodycam, I was far, far away from there. Not in space, in time. I fell aside into the past, existed in several dimensions at once. Here and there, in the past and in the now. The reality of that feeling equals the power of reality itself.

Now wandering these forests is truly dangerous. Once I burst out of bushes to a sign indicating that I had come straight out of a minefield.

Sometimes it is worth stopping in time.

Choosing life, arrangement, especially considering its current disarray, the ruined family you try to resurrect, the amount of accumulated material and the massif of literary work ahead.

Mining is a new dimension of terra incognita. Before, the Zone repelled with a leopard skin of radiation spots; now it is speckled with mines that determine the course of thinking and the direction of route. Mining covers the map with the purple fog of war from the third Heroes. Its star blanket lies over the marshes, and each of its dots-stars is a mine.

The old maps have lost meaning, turned into Schubert’s three-verst sheets, Guillaume de Beauplan’s General Plan of the Wild Fields, into medieval pilgrim maps, colorful schematic illustrations in the center of which there was always drawn one single, most important city.

Jerusalem.

by Markiyan Kamysh
Chornobyl Zone — Kyiv
29–30 June 2025

Translation assisted by ChatGPT (OpenAI), GPT-5.4 Thinking, on March 2025. Editorial intervention: none.