Hanna Zavorotnya while picking mushrooms in the forests around her village Kupovate in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. She is a self settler (Samosely), one of the babushkas who refused to leave the Zone. In the summer after the evacuation (following the Chernobyl disaster 1986) she and her family turned back to their farm. Zavorotnya lived through Stalin’s Holodomor – the genocide-by-famine of the 1930s that wiped out millions of Ukrainians – and then the Nazis in the 1940s. When asked about radiation, Zavorotnya replied: “Radiation doesn’t scare me. Starvation does." Kupovate, Ukraine

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Size: 3399px × 5099px
Location: Kupovate, 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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