Maria Shovkuia, 98 years old. She is one of the babushkas who refused to leave her home inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Some months after the evacuation (following the Chernobyl disaster 1986) she and her husband turned back to their farm. After his death she is living as the last self settler alone and isolated in her village. Maria lived through Stalin's Holodomor – the genocide-by-famine of the 1930s that wiped out millions of Ukrainians – and then the Nazis in the the Chernobyl accident many were simply unwilling to flee an enemy that was Exclusion Zone

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Size: 4510px × 3007px
Location: Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ivankiv Raion, Kiev Oblast, Ukraine, Eastern Europe
Photo credit: © Juliane Thiere / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

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