irradiated

Some years ago, at a small cartographer's shop in Budapest's District VI, I bought a map of Belarus. Most of it was coloured in the usual browns and greens of maps the world over, but in the bottom right-hand corner was a patch of angry red and yellow, representing and area of hundreds of square miles. This was the land still irradiated after the Chernobyl meltdown, over the border in the Ukraine.