The city was founded over a millennium ago and was the capital of an
ancient Slavic state that was later incorporated into Kievan Rus?. The
name may be derived from the word korost 'brushwood, bushes, shrubbery';
the form Iskorosten' sometimes found in early sources is probably based
on the common repetition of prepositions in Old Russian: iz grada iz...
'from the city from...'.
Currently the city is relatively small,
mainly because of the fact that it is located very close to Chernobyl.
After the nuclear incident, the area around the city was declared a zone
of a voluntary evacuation
