Chornobyl

Chornobyl lies in the forested country north of Kyiv, where the land rises gently above the floodplain and is crossed by routes toward the Pripyat basin. Its written history begins in 1193, when a charter described a hunting lodge of Prince Rurik Rostislavich in Kievan Rus'. Excavations have recovered tenth- to twelfth-century layers beneath the town, showing that occupation preceded that surviving record.

In 1362 the settlement was a crown village of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and possessed its own castle. The castle was ruined at least twice, in 1473 and in 1482, amid the frontier warfare that repeatedly affected the region. Later Chornobyl became an important local centre in a landscape of nobles' estates, woodland and river communication. Jews settled there from the sixteenth century, and at the end of the eighteenth century the town became a major Hasidic centre under the Twersky dynasty.