Zamoshnya

Zamoshnya is a small village in the southwestern part of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, located 20 km from the city of Pripyat, on the left bank of the Uzh river.

Initially, the Zamoshnaya was formed in 1900 as a settlement of Old Believers from the village of Glinka, located very close by. The Old Believers built a large stone church and a monastery in 1898. The village housed 611 citizens. The monastery ‘Church of Our Lady of Kazan’ was inhabited by 10 nuns. Under Soviet rule, the village flourished. In 1968 there were 240 people living in Zamoshnya. It had a school, a theater, and library.

Old Believers or Old Ritualists are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Eastern Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms.

Chernobyl disaster

After the Chernobyl disaster, the village was evacuated. Citizens were evacuated to the village of Lubyaka in the Borodyansky district. The buildings were left abandoned and in 1999 the village was officially removed from the registry.

The ruins of the church and the remains of the churchyard have survived to this day. It is one of the three last standing churches in the ‘Chernobyl Exclusion Zone’. Only the outer walls and some parts of the roof construction are still standing. In the church gardens there are the remains of the ‘Old Believers’ cemetery’ captured by wild trees, bushes and animals. I visited the village in 2015. More abandoned sites in the ‘Chernobyl Exclusion Zone’ can be found here.