Narowlya

Narowlya (Narovlya) is a small town of roughly 8,000 residents in southeastern Homielskaja voblasć, serving as the administrative center of Narowlya District on the border of the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve. In 1986 the town received heavy radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident; parts of the surrounding district were evacuated, and the disaster remains central to the town's identity today. The reserve itself — spanning the three worst-hit districts of Bragin, Narowlya, and Khoiniki, and covering over 216,000 hectares — was set up around the exclusion zone and, in the near-total absence of people, has become an unlikely wildlife refuge for European bison, Przewalski's horses, elk, brown bears, and golden and white-tailed eagles. Belarus allows organized tourist groups into its part of the zone to see bee and horse farms, bison feeding grounds, and abandoned villages, with Narowlya as a common access point.

• Narowlya Historical and Ethnographic Museum — Opened in 1995 in a late-19th-century wooden building on Aktsyabrskaya Street, with halls devoted to local painting, traditional weaving, icons and religious books, historic tableware, and a recreated peasant farmstead.
• Horwatt Palace (Harvat mansion) — The ruined 19th-century manor house of the Harvat family, who left Narowlya in the 1860s; it later served as a school before its interior was destroyed in the Second World War, and it now stands abandoned.
• Chernobyl memorial — A memorial in the town commemorating those evacuated and affected by the 1986 disaster.

• Khoyniki (40 km north) — Exclusion zone
• Yelsk (50 km east) — Border town