Pripyat (river)



The Pripyat or Prypiat is a river in Eastern Europe. The river, which is approximately 761 km long, flows east through Ukraine, Belarus, and Ukraine again, draining into the Dnieper.

Name etymology
Max Vasmer in his etymological dictionary notes that the historical name of the river mentioned in the earliest East Slavic document, the Primary Chronicle, is Pripet'  (Припеть), and cites the opinion of other linguists that the name meant "tributary", comparing with Greek and Latin roots. He also rejects some opinions which were improperly based on the stem -пять -pjat', rather than original -петь.

It might also derive from the local word pripech used for a river with sandy banks.

Overview
The Pripyat passes through the exclusion zone established around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The city of Pripyat, Ukraine (population 45,000) was completely evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster.

Pripyat has a catchment area of 121000 km2, 50900 km2 of which are in Belarus. 495 km of the whole river length lies within Belarus.

As of 2020, it is being dredged to enable the E40 waterway.

Location
The Pripyat begins in the Volhynian Upland, between the villages of Budniki, Volyn Oblast and Rohivi Smoliary in Volyn Oblast, Ukraine. After 204 km downstream, it crosses the border of Belarus, where it travels 500 km through Polesia, Europe's largest wilderness, within which lie the vast sandy wetlands known as the Pinsk marshes, a dense network of swamps, bogs, rivers and rivulets within a forested basin. For the last 50 kilometers the Pripyat flows again in Ukraine and flows several kilometers south of Chernobyl into the Kyiv Reservoir.

Geography
The length of the river is 775 kilometers. The area of the watershed is 114,300 km2. The Pripyat valley in the upper reaches is weak, in the lower reaches it is clearer. The floodplain is well-developed all along the flow, allocating two supra-floodplain terraces. The width of the floodplain in the upper course of 2–4 km and more, in some years, is flooded for several months. In the lower reaches, the width of the floodplain reaches 10–15 km. The channel in the upper canalized; below - winding, forms meanders, oxbows, many channels (one of them overlays the Nobel Lake); there are sandy islands. The width of the river in the upper reaches is up to 40 m, on the average - 50–70 m, in the lower reaches 100 - predominantly 250 m, with the entrance to the Kyiv Reservoir - 4–5 km. The bottom is sandy and sandy-silty. The slope of the river is 0.08 m / km.

Books

 * (in Russian, English and Polish) Ye.N.Meshechko, A.A.Gorbatsky (2005) Belarusian Polesye: Tourist Transeuropean Water Mains, Minsk, Four Quarters,
 * (in Belarusian, Russian and English) T.A.Khvagina (2005) POLESYE from the Bug to the Ubort, Minsk Vysheysha shkola, ISBN 985-06-1153-7.