ORBITA, Ukraine – “Where are you going?” a curious traveler asks on the bus from Cherkasy to Chyhyryn. She’s surprised when she hears that the destination is Orbita, a small town in the Chyhyryn District of Cherkasy Oblast in central Ukraine.“What do you want to go there for? Nobody lives there!” she says.
She’s wrong. While most of Orbita has been abandoned, vandalized and is slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding forest, 150 people still live here. They moved into abandoned flats of two five-story apartment buildings next to each other.
Soviet authorities had big plans for Orbita, which was founded in the 1970s as a satellite settlement for workers of the Chyhyryn regional hydroelectric power plant. It was planned to become a home for 20,000 people.
“Soon there will be schools, a palace of culture, a mall, a movie theater, a hospital, great community services, a palace of pioneers, and, of course, a nice beach,” the Soviet-era Pravda Ukrainy newspaper wrote in a story on Orbita published on Jan. 20, 1972.
“And in 1975, Chyhyryn regional hydroelectric power plant will provide electricity,” the report went on.
But that’s where things started to go wrong.
The power plant was never built. The construction was delayed and then abandoned in 1986 in the wake of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe. About 1,000 construction workers who lived in Orbita started leaving the town in search of work and a better life in bigger cities.
By 2003, Orbita had been almost completely abandoned and didn’t even have hot water because the pipeline was stolen. Orbita’s only visitors were mainly scavengers and the occasional music video producers attracted by the post-apocalyptic look of the town.
In 2011, the settlement was officially incorporated into the nearby village of Vitove, and people started to return. And the death and destruction wrought by Russia’s war on Ukraine has, ironically, brought life back to Orbita.
“A ghost town? Nonsense! You’ll see some of the cheerful ‘ghosts’ who live there!” laughs Mykola Vozvyshaev, deputy head of the Vitove village council, as he drives his old cherry-red Lada towards the settlement.
“And it’s not even a town anymore – it’s Orbita Street of Vitove,” Vozvyshaev grins.
The Lada rattles down an old road deeper into the woods, and turns left at a rusting sign with the settlement’s name. Soon, a row of abandoned high-rise buildings becomes visible through the trees, and then the ruined shells of a large grocery store and a community club. Grass and trees grow from cracked asphalt.
So far, Orbita looks like something straight out of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
“Maybe it’s because of these abandoned buildings that Orbita has been dubbed a dead town,” says Vozvyshaev. “But the truth is that Orbita even has its own communal enterprise to serve the local people. Sure, the pharmacy, shops and the hospital are seven kilometers away. But what pure air!”
The Lada turns right, past the ruined store and the community center, and heads towards two light-blue buildings. As it approaches, curtained windows and satellite dishes show that there are indeed people living here, in the depths of the woods, amid shattered and abandoned buildings. As the Lada rolls up to the five-story blocks, dogs start barking.
A lone boy plays in a playground nearby.
“We saw a sort of revival in 2014 and 2015,” Vozvyshaev says. “People from Kyiv and Cherkasy started to buy apartments here and make sort of summer cottages. Internally displaced people from the Donbas settled here and also bought flats.”
Liudmila and Volodymyr Golovyn and their granddaughter Alina are some of those displaced by Russia’s war on Ukraine. They moved to Orbita from Volnovakha in Donetsk Oblast last year.
“Volnovakha is in an area controlled by Ukraine, so apart from the tragedy with the bus, the city didn’t come under fire,” Liudmila says, referring to the January shelling attack on a passenger bus at a checkpoint near Volnovakha, killing 13 civilians. “But we were afraid that if the mercenaries decided to invade Mariupol, the war would come to our home.”
It was hard for the Golovyns to get used to life in Orbita.
“In Volnovakha we had everything we needed close at hand – pharmacy, shops, market, hospital,” says Liudmila. “When we moved here into the woods I thought my life was over.”
But the Golovyns soon fell in love with Orbita, and bought an apartment for Hr 30,000 (about $1,300).
Nine-year-old Alina goes to school in Vitove and doesn’t really want to go back to Volnovakha. “When we arrived and came out of the bus, Alina asked ‘Do you smell perfume in the air?,’ referring to the smell of the pines,” says Liudmila.
The people of Orbita have to grow their own food. They turned rusty garages into hen houses and barns to store crops. The Golovyns got a lot in a state-owned field a kilometer from Orbita and use it to grow vegetables. The soil is very good, they say.
But in January the Golovyns will go back to the Donbas. “Everything seems to be quiet there,” Volodymyr says.
Absence of central heating is another reason to leave Orbita. Last winter, the family used an electric heater, but this year they can’t afford it. Some of Orbita’s residents move to Cherkasy and Kyiv for the winter, but most of them stay. Hanna Hrytsenko, who has lived in Orbita since the 1970s, says she’s used to the cold. She sleeps with her cat for warmth, she says.
She recalls Orbita’s golden age – when the settlement’s 1,000 residents could buy the best dairy products in the district in their new store, and the newly built apartment blocks still had doors and windows.
A bank of the Dnipro River in a kilometer away from the ghost town Orbita in Cherkasy Oblast on Oct.9.
Now that the town has become part of his responsibility, Vozvyshaev, the deputy head of the Vitove village council, hopes Orbita’s golden age will return. He sees a future for the place as a vacation resort or for farming fish, and he’s searching for investors and a new plan.
“All the investors want detailed business plans, but I don’t know how to write one properly,” he says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected]
