By the late 18th century, Chernobyl had become one of the great centers of Hasidic Judaism in Eastern Europe. The Twersky dynasty - founded by Menachem Nachum Twersky, who died in 1797, and continued by his son Mordechai - drew Jewish pilgrims from across the Pale of Settlement. For 150 years the town was a place of Jewish learning, prayer, and trade. Pogroms in the early 20th century thinned the community, and the surviving Twersky rebbes left for the United States and Israel before the war. When the German army occupied Chernobyl on August 25, 1941, only about 400 Jews remained in town. They were murdered during the Holocaust. The Polish and German Catholic communities had already been deported to Kazakhstan in 1936 during Stalin's frontier clearances. Each chapter of the town's history added a new absence.

When Reactor 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the immediate evacuation focused on Pripyat, the modern atom-city built next to the plant. Chernobyl proper, 16 kilometers downwind from ground zero and somewhat shielded by terrain, was not evacuated until May 5, nine days later. Soviet authorities measured surface contamination of cesium-137 at around 555 kilobecquerels per square meter - significant, but later analyses concluded that permanent relocation could not be justified on radiological grounds alone. Current dose rates are roughly comparable to natural background radiation in many parts of the world. The 14,000 residents were resettled in the new city of Slavutych, built east of the exclusion zone. Most never returned. A small population of about 150 lives in the town today, mostly shift workers managing the disaster.

After 1986, a particular passage from the Book of Revelation began circulating: 'And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.' Wormwood is Artemisia absinthium, a relative of the mugwort whose Slavic name became the town's. The coincidence is striking, and it has launched a thousand newspaper columns and at least one indie film. The actual etymology is more prosaic: most linguists trace Chornobyl to an Old East Slavic personal name combined with a possessive suffix, meaning the place that belonged to someone called Chornobyl. The town was named long before its dark hour. The poetry came later.

Chernobyl today has two general stores and a hotel. The town serves as the administrative base for the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, the body that runs the cordoned area around the disaster site. Apartment blocks once home to families have been repurposed as dormitories for staff cycling in and out of the zone on schedules calibrated to limit cumulative radiation dose. The 16th-century St. Elijah church, the only church operating in the zone, holds occasional services. From February to April 2022, Russian forces occupied the town during the failed push toward Kyiv, using it as a staging ground. They left in late March. Now the town is back to its strange ordinary: workers, wildlife, weather, and the feeling - difficult to shake - that you are walking through the prologue of someone else's story.