Everyone is talking about the series *Chernobyl*. And I’d like to say a few words myself, as someone who spent every summer there until 1986, in my grandmother’s village, and who has been “in the Zone” many times since the accident. It’s an unbelievably great series, made with enormous affection for all the people involved: the firefighters, the liquidators (cleanup workers), the soldiers, and the local collective farm workers—people like my own relatives, who lived in what is now the evacuated zone. Yesterday I watched another episode. When they show the hut of a local old woman who refuses to leave, every little detail—from the bluish photographs on the walls to the way she milked the cow—was a complete flashback to my childhood. Everything is portrayed very accurately. I can see people online discussing minor inaccuracies here and there (like spotting an enclosed balcony), but come on—it’s a dramatized series, and for something like this, the realism is simply phenomenal. These days, Chernobyl and Pripyat look like fairly tidy towns, just without any people. But the villages are deeply eerie. The streets are overgrown with trees. The houses have been ransacked by looters; everything was taken out of them, from the floorboards to the tiles. Who even needed all that old junk? In the second photo, I’m in my grandmother’s house, standing in front of the stove I absolutely loved sleeping on. All in all, I highly recommend the series. It shows what it was really like. If anything, it even softens it a little. In real life, it was worse.