Don’t rebuild the dam: Ukrainian experts urge Unesco to protect site uncovered by Russian sabotage

Andriy Denysenko, hydroarchaeologist, restorer and senior research fellow at Khortytsia national reserve. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianView image in fullscreenAndriy Denysenko, hydroarchaeologist, restorer and senior research fellow at Khortytsia national reserve. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianDon’t rebuild the dam: Ukrainian experts urge Unesco to protect site uncovered by Russian sabotageAs archaeologists find treasure trove along new floodplain, conservationists say another Nova Kakhovka would be ecocide

On a warm September day, a group of underwater archaeologists and researchers were boiling water for tea on their campfire on the banks of the Dnipro River, tents pitched on the sandy shoreline. They were three weeks into an archaeological expedition of the waters around Khortytsia – a rocky island 12.5km long and 2.5km wide that lies just downstream of the city of Zaporizhzhia, in south-eastern Ukraine.

High above the island, a Shahed drone whined on its way. A Ukrainian interceptor, and small-arms fire from the ground, tried, unsuccessfully, to bring it down. The archaeologists ignored it. This is life as normal, 28 miles (45km) from the combat zone in Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Olena Dzneladze, senior research fellow at Ukraine’s national Institute of Archaeology, showed off their remarkable finds: a bronze-age deer antler, its tip shaped into a tool to press patterns into pottery or leather; a shard of ceramic most likely made by the Scythians, an ancient nomadic people of the steppe; a chunk of a Byzantine amphora; an 18th-century anchor.

Most spectacular, though was an entire boat, hollowed out of a single tree trunk and beautifully preserved by a millennium’s river immersion – one of many remarkable vessels, including 18th-century warships, that have been discovered in this part of the Dnipro. The team was planning to lift it from the river the following day.

With its neighbouring, smaller islands, Khortytsia comprises a natural and historical reserve – a place of profound symbolic importance to Ukraine’s national narrative as the first stronghold of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, and with traces of human life stretching back to the Mesolithic era.

Khortytsia lies at the head of a vast landscape known as the “great meadow”. This 2,155 sq km area was, between the building of the Nova Kakhovka dam in the 1950s until 6 June 2023, covered by a reservoir. That was the day the 30-metre high, 3km-long structure was blown up – by the Russians, according to most analysts.

Unchecked by the dam, the waters of the reservoir – 18 cubic km of it – drained out of its bed and roared downstream, creating an acute humanitarian crisis as its waters inundated towns and villages on both sides of the river, and both sides of the frontline.

View image in fullscreenArcheologists move a boat hollowed out from a single tree trunk, which was found underwater just off Khortytsia island. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianNow, however, a vocal group of historians, naturalists, ecologists and archaeologists want to see this territory of the “great meadow” protected as a Unesco world heritage site for its value as a natural and a cultural environment. The former reservoir bed has, with startling speed, regenerated itself into something like its pre-dam self: a habitat of wetlands, grassland and islands, richly populated with the traces of thousands of years of human life. The dam, say the experts, must never be rebuilt.

Over 100 Ukrainian NGOs are formally supporting the bid. A letter of intent has been sent to Unesco, and cooperation sought from the Ukrainian government’s culture ministry. But other interests will want to see the dam replaced and the reservoir remade, to irrigate Ukraine’s southern farmlands. Soon after its destruction, the Ukrainian government set up a pilot project with the state-owned hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo to prepare the groundwork for its reconstruction after the end of the war.

Valeriy Nefedov, leading the team of archaeologists on the island, is one of those pressing for the preservation of the “unique historical and natural environment” that has re-emerged. In 1999 the underwater archaeologist an early-18th-century warship in these waters, now in the island’s Museum of Navigation. And, in the summer of 2023, he was one of the first to set foot on to the 2,155 sq kilometre territory revealed by the drained Kakhovka reservoir.

View image in fullscreenOlexandr Tsegelnyk, head of the development and planning sector at the Khortytsia national reserve, in Khortytsia. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianNefedov was serving in the army on 6 June 2023, in the Donetsk region, and quickly heard the news of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam. For him, there was a certain irony: since the 1990s, he had been pressing for the dam’s gradual dismantling, the draining of the reservoir and the restitution of the “great meadow” with its mosaic of grassland ecosystems and marshes, reed beds, scrub and sandy mounds.

But not like this, in one single, catastrophic event. “The first crime was building the dam in the first place,” he said. “The second was blowing it up.”

Later that month, he was asked to join a newly formed military unit consisting of experts – historians, ecologists, scientists and other researchers – to investigate the reservoir bed.

View image in fullscreenOlena Dzneladze and Andriy Denysenko at the Chaika Maritime Museum on Khortytsia island. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian“Of course, I had some expectations about what I might see. But when we reached the area, it is impossible to describe the impressions and emotions I felt. The consequences were staggering: what had been a reservoir had, within a very short time, turned into the exposed bottom of the body of water. On the other hand, there was a sense of danger.”

This was the grey zone, no man’s land, “extremely tense”, he said. There was constant shelling. Though Ukrainian reconnaissance units had been there ahead of them, Russian sabotage groups were also on the prowl. And they could see the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where the Russians were positioned. “It was a very strange feeling,” he said, “being between the positions of our Ukrainian forces and those of our Russian enemies.”

Read moreIt was more than that, though: a watery territory, that he knew intimately as a diver, was now dry land, and he was walking across it. “It felt like terra incognita, unknown land – as if we were the first people to set foot on it,” he said. “Everything we saw and found there made us feel like explorers or discoverers.

“Very unusual, almost fantastical landscapes appeared before us. Ancient channels, straits and islands had been revealed.

View image in fullscreenA disused boat as seen from Khortytsia island in Zaporizhzhia. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian“We saw the remains of settlements, the foundations of houses, roads. We also found archaeological material lying directly on the surface, from the neolithic right through into the 20th century.”

There were also toxic heavy metals revealed on the reservoir bed, which biologist Pavlo Oliinyk, one of the research team at Khortytsia, is involved in monitoring. But, he said, the rapid growth of vegetation in the drained “great meadow” area may provide a “green shield”. Trees, he said, had already grown up to as much as 7 metres high in the reservoir area, in just three years.

“Building the dam was ecocide, destroying the dam was ecocide, and the third ecocide would be rebuilding it,” he said.

The “great meadow”, this vast area of the Dnipro floodplain – which remains a grey zone between the opposing armies – has always had huge significance owing to its unique topography; its first surviving mention in the written record is by Herodotus, the fifth-century BCE Greek historian. This section of the Dnipro was the last easily navigable stretch of the river north of the Black Sea, before the rapids upstream at Zaporizhzhia rendered the river unmanageable by all but the most knowledgable.

View image in fullscreenA fire at the archaeology camp on Khortytsia island. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianThis protective geography created a safe haven for the Cossacks, who, fleeing persecution in the 16th century, established a free, quasi-democratic polity here. This Cossack state became a important reference for the 19th-century intellectuals, including national poet Taras Shevchenko, who led the modern Ukrainian national project.

The area’s significance goes back even deeper. Also working on the island of Khortytsia in September was archaeologist Anatoliy Volkov, who, inland from the group of underwater archaeologists, was excavating one of a series of bronze-age stone enclosures. “We are in a frontline area,” he said of continuing his work during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “We are potentially threatened. There is always a chance a missile or rocket will land here, and so the more we research and preserve, the better.”

The urgency of the research and monitoring was even more acute on the shoreline and riverbed, according to archaeologist Olena Dzneladze. After the blowing of the dam, she said, thousands of tons of sand started to move down the river, “with artefacts appearing in the moving sand”.

View image in fullscreenAnatoliy Volkov, research fellow at Khortytsia national reserve, showing the archaeology site on the island. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The GuardianAmid this volatile military and geographical situation, the Dnipro is settling into something like its old course, before the Nova Kakhovka dam was completed in 1956. Between Khortytsia and the next great dam upstream, at Zaporizhzhia, further rocky islands and sandy spits have been revealed as the water level has sunk 6-8 metres, transforming the landscape.

Serhii Plokhii, Harvard’s professor of Ukrainian history, grew up in Zaporizhzhia hearing his grandfather’s stories of hunting in the wetlands of the “great meadow” before the dam was built. He recalled his emotions seeing the newly emerging landscape of the famous Zaporizhzhia rapids for the first time – though most of the rocky outcrops lie upstream, still submerged thanks to the Zaporizhzhia dam.

“It was something that I read about and was part of history, but I had never seen before. And I thought: ‘Whatever happens with the Nova Kakhovka dam, whether they will rebuild it or not, I at least have had this chance to see this piece of history that was there, but was always invisible.’”