Presentations at an international expert meeting in Girona.

Kateryna Aslamova and Yaroslav Yemelianenko went to the eighth ECM TIC expert meeting in Girona, Spain. Ukraine was represented there by two teams: Chornobyl and the Lviv Tourism Office.

Both gave talks: how Chornobyl tourism began, how we built a network of information centers, how villages around the Zone come back to life with jobs. The hall applauded.

That is what surprised the Europeans most. For them Chornobyl was about dark tourism for a narrow circle. And we told them how tourism revives an affected region - not through resettlement and not through subsidies, but through work. People from surrounding villages go to work in tourism, local craftspeople make souvenirs, and a community that suffered in 1986 and in the decades that followed pulls together and recovers precisely thanks to Chornobyl.

European colleagues work through research and long-term plans, while we are always on the front line and react fast. "To them we're crazy people who do national-level projects without any conditions," Yaroslav wrote after the talk.

Girona left another thought too. Walking down a street 1,700 years old, Yaroslav wrote about why he "latched on" to Chornobyl. It is the recent history of Ukraine, which changed the course of world events and which has not yet been destroyed or erased. "If we have lost our ancient past, let us have the sense not to lose the present."

Back home, Yaroslav talked about the same thing with an MBA group of the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School. The topic was "Chornobyl: a story of trauma or of victory?"