In the zone: remembrance in Velyki Klishchi (04/28/96)

In the zone: remembrance in Velyki Klishchi

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

VELYKI KLISHCHI, Ukraine - Nastia Potapchuk, 73, wipes the tears from her eyes and makes a sign of the cross as she approaches the house she called home for more than 40 years. It's located at 119 Lenin St., just down the asphalt road from the village's showcase - a blue and green wooden structure with plated domes - the Church of St. Michael.

Today, Sunday, April 21, she and two busloads of her neighbors have returned to the church - which holds services only once a year on Providna Nedilia (St. Thomas Sunday) - to the village cemetery and to their beloved, now abandoned, homes overgrown with weeds, tall grasses and ivy.

It's an annual pilgrimage for Mrs. Potapchuk and her neighbors, who were evacuated six years ago and moved, 90 kilometers to the south in Zhytomyr Oblast, where they were given government-built homes in the village of Lysivka, Brosylivsky region.

They charter buses for a million karbovantsi round trip to make the two-hour trip to their native lands, to visit the graves of their loved ones, to share the joy of the Easter season with them. This year, they bring with them a young Ukrainian Orthodox priest, the Rev. Yaroslav Vovkovych, 19, who has only served them for one year in the village of Lysivka, but who seems to understand their pain.

"This day we not only remember our ancestors, our beloved relatives, but we also remember the way life was before Chornobyl, "said Mrs. Potapchuk, as a choir composed of her neighbors sang "Lord Have Mercy," in response to the memorial service. This year, she made the trip alone, without her husband, whom she affectionately calls "did" (grandpa) because he is too ill to travel.

"He warned me not to go into the house, saying that I would be too distraught for weeks on end. But how could I return to my village and not come home?" she adds, uprooting some periwinkle and sticking it in her pocket to take to her garden in Lysivka.

In 1989, Velyki Klishchi was designated Chornobyl Zone 2 - a region where resettlement was mandatory - because the radiation readings were 15 curies or higher. All 370 families in the village were evacuated. Many of the families moved to the south of the oblast and were resettled in their new homes. [Of course, if there is Velyki Klishchi, there is also Mali Klishchi; that town also was evacuated in 1989, but seven people currently live there.

Today only Nastia Avramchuk, 65, lives in the village, on the very edge of town. She has only one visitor - Hanna Prokopchuk, 66, from the neighboring town of Bazar, who maintains the Church of St. Michael.

"As long as I am alive, I will tend to our little treasure," said Mrs. Prokopchuk, whose grandparents were married in the church at the beginning of the century and whose children were baptized there after the second world war.

"I don't remember this church ever being closed," she explained. "It has always been a place we could go to find comfort," she added.

But, after the village was evacuated, the local administration locked the church up, and it stood abandoned on the village crossroads. The residents of Velyki Klishchi took the church's icons, altar and gates to their new settlement in Lysivka. But, Mrs. Prokopchuk went to the local authorities to ask them that the house of worship be kept open for weary travelers, for returnees, for those wishing to pray. She promised to maintain the grounds, a duty she tends to religiously.

She dreams of collecting enough money to give the church a new paint job and to repair the leaky roof.

On this religious holiday of remembrance - which Ukrainians believe is a day when the departed reunite with their living relatives - the people of Velyki Klishchi are also reunited with their friends and relatives from all over Ukraine, who have come to honor the memory of their ancestors and their village.

"I was not ready for the evacuation out of Velyki Klishchi," explains Mrs. Potapchuk. "I thought my final journey would be to the cemetery under the old oak tree down the road," she said.

Now, six years after the evacuation, she and her friends do not envision returning home. The houses have been neglected, the half-built brick school house and the two large stores in the village center have been vandalized. The memorial board honoring the dead soldiers of World War II is dilapidated and the statue of the soldier who guards the village is in need of a paint job.

She and her friend Hanna Avramchuk, 53, to this day are puzzled why an asphalt road was laid in the village after the 1986 Chornobyl accident, why a new school was being built, and why gas and water was installed in their homes.

"We had no idea that we were going to be evacuated," noted Maria Ilchuk, who admits that not a day goes by without her thinking about life in the village.

"The land where your mother gave birth to you is most dear to you," she repeats an old Ukrainian proverb over and over, and laments over the berries, cherries and mushrooms that grew in the region.

As the throngs of grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers, fathers, children and grandchildren make their way in a procession to the memorial service at the cemetery, to the gravesites of the generations of Avramchuks, Prokopchuks, Ilchuks, Potapchuks, Lukianenkos and Vorobeys, to share the hope brought on by the Easter season, to share an Easter repast with their ancestors in the distance, the Church of St. Michael serves as their guiding light, the source of their faith.

A calm comes over the village of Velyki Klishchi as its families have come home again.

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