Hidden Cities: Travels to the Secret Corners of the World's Great Metropolises; A Memoir of Urban Exploration

by Gates, Moses

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Ukraine, June 2009

  After Moscow, Steve and I take a train to the Ukraine—the Muscovites introduced us to explorers from Kiev. Our first day, after walking for over an hour through a Soviet-era water tunnel, we find out the exit is a seven-story climb up and out a shaft. It doesn’t seem so hard: there’s a staircase, rusty but serviceable. Steve and the two Ukrainians we’re with are off trying to leverage an old rail cart onto some tracks to create a sort of roller coaster. I get bored and decide to try to jump-start the end of the trip by starting the climb out. On my second step up the rusty staircase, most of the first flight of stairs collapses.

  The others hear the racket and rush over, laughing at my stupidity. Neither of them speaks much English, so instead they show me what we’re expected to do. As it turns out, we’re not supposed to use the staircase at all. Instead, they scale the rusted insides of the tube—which have a waffle-like pattern affording handholds and footholds—for about fifteen feet, hauling themselves up onto a rusted-through metal landing supported by some crossbeams. They make sure to keep their body weight over the crossbeams and keep hanging on to the wall at the same time. We follow them up, repeat seven times, and pop out a manhole into a grassy field, the shining sun more than welcome.

  OOPS. SOVIET-ERA WATER TUNNEL. KIEV, UKRAINE.

  We spend a few more class days exploring drainage tunnels; climbing my first-ever cable-stayed bridge, the Moscow Bridge over the Dnieper River, in the middle of the day; and exploring an under-construction metro tunnel.

  This last one doesn’t go so well. After walking for more than a mile through the tube, one of the Ukrainians and I end up getting seen while checking out the tunnel-boring machine, and we have to book it out through an uncompleted station past a pack of barking guard dogs. Steve, who in addition to being sick is having one of his bad-hip days, has dragged himself for over a mile through the tunnel and has just finished setting up his first shot and is about to hit the shutter when we come running like hell back toward him. “I was about ready to kill myself just to get a rest,” he told me later. “When I saw you running I was so pissed, but I knew we just had to cut our loses and get the fuck out of there. I was seriously at my limit: no matter how scared I was, I couldn’t go any faster. I just had a feeling of ‘Well, why bother being scared. Whatever happens happens.’”

  TOP OF THE MOSCOW BRIDGE. KIEV, UKRAINE.

  • • •

  The Kiev crew, in turn, introduces us to explorers from Odessa. We meet two of them, Anastasia (Ani for short) and her boyfriend, Sasha, the day we arrive.

  We stay at Sasha’s apartment, where he lives with his mother and siblings, and where we’re treated to typical Ukrainian hospitality—meaning Sasha and his family cannot go more than a few hours without making sure we’re fed. Steve’s innocent charm ends up extending well past the language barrier. Sasha and his mother argue, the way grown children living with their parents will, and during one particularly heated exchange Sasha’s mother looks at Sasha, shakes her fist disapprovingly, and then immediately goes over to Steve and pinches his cheeks.

  Odessa, as a city, reminds me of no place more than New Orleans. It’s not the geography or architecture, it’s the similarity of character and of their place in the greater pantheon of the cities of their respective regions of the world. Like New Orleans, Odessa isn’t a capital—isn’t even one of the larger cities in the country. Its citizens are by and large poor, its economy not the greatest. Its best days are obviously about 150 years behind it. Yet it’s still full of character, can still hold its own on a cultural level with towns that far outpace its population and economy. “Oh, yes—everyone knows that the funniest comedians/baddest gangsters/best writers are from Odessa,” was a constant refrain.

  And of course, among these superlatives can be included “longest tunnels.” The city lies in a region with no natural forests. Because of this, the limestone of the surrounding area is the main building material and has been continually quarried for about two hundred years. The result is a sprawling, mostly unmapped series of tunnels spreading out from the center of Odessa. The network is gigantic: well over one thousand miles of abandoned stone quarries that, as in Paris, have taken on the colloquial name of “the catacombs.”

  Our trip is a blast. The tone is set when, after meeting up with a few other Ukrainian explorers, we go to get provisions for our initial excursion. I ask Ani and Sasha if we should get bottled water or if it’s OK to fill up from the tap. In return, they inform us that we’re not getting water at all. Instead they show us several two-liter plastic bottles of beer that we’re taking instead. This is for hydration. For celebration, we have three bottles of vodka. This is when I learn Ukrainians drink beer like water and vodka like beer.

  CATA PARTY. ODESSA, UKRAINE.

  Supplies in tow, we drive out to one of the small towns that surround Odessa. It’s the middle of the day, and there’s no need to be clandestine about where we’re going. Exploring the quarries outside Odessa is perfectly legal. In fact, the people we’re with are who the police call if they get reports of someone lost in the catacombs.

  And people do get lost. These aren’t the nice, stabilized tunnels of Paris, with their detailed maps, underground street signs, and generations of patrolling by cataphiles and the IGC. This network is raw, and incredibly labyrinthine; I remember missing out on seeing the similarly uncatalogued one in Naples, and am glad I’ve come all this way. We do three or four trips to various sections, some new, some old. One time we even drive through one of the newer quarries, which has large, rectangular tunnels big enough for a small auto to navigate.

  Our trip is mostly social: a couple hours spent wandering the tunnels underground, followed by a few more in a large cavern eating, drinking, drinking some more, and learning how to swear in Russian. The network isn’t like the Parisian tunnels, with something noteworthy around every bend, but the history we do run into is haunting.

  ROLL CALL.

  First we come to a cavern with several names written in Cyrillic on the wall, which Ani and Sasha explain are the names of a group of partisans who hid in the quarries while fighting the fascist occupation: Odessa was under occupation by the Axis powers from October of 1941 to April of 1944. During this occupation, the catacombs were used as a base for several groups of these fighters, who numbered about three hundred overall. There’s an official museum in part of the catacombs that’s dedicated to this history (in true Soviet fashion, it’s called the Museum of Partisan Glory) in the village of Nerubayskoye—not too far away from where we are—but, like the official catacombs museum in Paris, it’s a tiny part of the overall network.

  Continuing on, we see plenty of other remnants of this time: old weapons, bullets, bottles, graffiti, and, most heartbreakingly, a cavern where one of the walls is painted to represent a bedroom, with windows, furniture, and a plant growing in a pot on the windowsill. And then we turn a corner and see, carved into the limestone wall, a circle about a foot in diameter with a swastika carved into it.

  My first thought is that this isn’t real, wasn’t actually carved by actual Nazis, was instead inscribed later by some punk. This is reinforced by my remembrance that Odessa was occupied mainly by the Romanians during World War II, with Nazi Germany being involved only sporadically after the initial victory. And it’s further reinforced by something else I’ve run into, which is the unbelievable amount of neo-Nazi graffiti in Eastern Europe. And it wasn’t just on the street: I found it in the underground, too, in hillside drainage tunnels in Kiev and a utility network in Moscow.

  On all my travels, everywhere, I’ve held open the possibility that I’ll run into, as we American Semites put it, fellow “members of the tribe.” My favorite thing about being Jewish is the internationalism, the sense that you’re part of some vague worldwide crew. It’s difficult to even put that on paper, as it brings up ima
ges of old anti-Semitic canards of secret cabals and quests for global domination. But there is something to the bond that’s shared simply by being Jewish, even if you don’t otherwise share a country, language, ethnicity, or really even a religion. Jews are the most internationalistic people in the history of humanity, which is the primary reason they have always been among the first targets of nationalist movements, turning to nationalism themselves only in a last-ditch attempt at survival after almost two thousand years of rejecting it.

  It’s not just the fact that there have been settled Jewish communities in almost every nation on earth, although history, and the twentieth century in particular, has seen the extinction of dozens of them. During my travels, expatriates I’ve run into—or even random backpackers—have all seemed to be disproportionally Jewish. It seems like my people are just comfortable being on the road, rarely averse to rolling into new and unfamiliar locales. I have always wondered how much of my wanderlust is in the blood, part of the tradition passed down ever since my eponymous predecessor led his forty-year migration.

  Compounding this possibility, Odessa is one of the most Jewish cities in Eastern Europe, despite the community being decimated during the Holocaust and most of the surviving community immigrating to the United States after the fall of communism. And many urban explorers, as a rule, have much of that same wanderlust, that same curiosity, that I’ve noticed in my brethren. I always half expect there to be this overlap when I meet new explorers abroad. For instance, I was pretty sure Eric, my jolly companion from France, was Jewish, although it never came up as an overt topic of conversation. As such, I would not have been surprised at all to hear a few Yiddishisms escape from the mouths of any of the people we were with.

  But here there’s also a strange inversion to this possibility. In my time in Eastern Europe, I gathered that being a neo-Nazi might be something that’s extreme, sure, not in the mainstream, yet not so entirely beyond the pale that it’s a social death sentence, something that you just aren’t allowed to espouse in public. My best analogy is that being a neo-Nazi in Eastern Europe is akin to something along the lines of being a member of the Westboro Baptist Church in America, the ones who hold up the “God Hates Fags” signs. Someone whose views are taken as extreme, out of the mainstream political consensus, but who isn’t afraid of being seen on camera espousing these views (and is definitely not averse to writing them on the wall of an abandoned limestone quarry). One Russian explorer whose tagline read “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for the white race” even tried to friend me on Facebook.

  As a result, I’ve been a little wary about the people I’ve met. Not suspicious exactly, but just as “Maybe the people we meet will turn out to be Jewish” has been put into the category of “within the realm of possibility” in my head, “Maybe the people we meet will turn out to be neo-Nazis” has been transferred there from its previous home of “something that would make a bad episode of Seinfeld” as well.

  Already I had run into this issue with Max, whose handle was “Moscowhite” on LiveJournal. When I broached the subject of this online moniker, he responded, “Oh. I know what it is you are thinking. You are thinking I am fucking racist. I want the name ‘Moscovite’ for LiveJournal. You know, like someone from Moscow. But somebody already has ‘Moscovite.’ So I take ‘Moscowhite’ because it sounds like ‘Moscovite.’ I am not thinking like white people, black people, like that. Later I learn that everyone that is speaking English is thinking I am fucking racist. I am not fucking racist! But now everyone on LiveJournal knows me by fucking ‘Moscowhite,’ so it is too late.”

  I look at the carving on the wall for a while, and my companions catch me staring. I relay my skepticism about the authenticity of the carving, suggesting that it was probably neo-Nazi locals who carved it. But my companions insist otherwise.

  “No, that is from the war,” they tell me. “There are other ones in here. They all look the same.”

  More than any other modern regime, Nazi Germany has been thoroughly discredited, its historical imprint wiped from current existence. In Italy you can still run across buildings whose keystone reads “built during the XIVth year of the Fascist regime.” In the United States there’s a Tennessee state park named for the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But there is no place in the entirety of Europe where the government would allow a Nazi relic to be displayed openly, at least outside the confines of a museum with a very good explanation for it.

  This carving is one of the rarest things a person could find. Even in the German bunker in the Paris catacombs there was nothing past a few generic words of German on the walls. Much of the purpose, the excitement, in urban exploration is finding this kind of thing, a historical remnant preserved because of the remoteness and inaccessibility of the location. I’ve gotten to see something incredibly rare. My emotions are telling me differently, but my head says I should leave it as is, leave it for others to experience, to have their own thoughts and feelings upon its discovery. After all, ideologically the Nazis have been universally debunked and destroyed. There is nothing left to fight, the victory long since complete.

  And if I were someone different, had a different family with a different history, I would have likely heeded this thought and left it alone. And if another, different person had made this choice, I would have understood, made no judgments.

  But I’m not a different person. To me, these people aren’t a vague historical ideology, just a symbol and an epithet now. All I can think of when I look at the carving in the stone is that whoever put it there wanted to murder my whole family.

  I pick up a piece of glass, dig it into the soft limestone, and start to hack away. I don’t stop to think how it will be thought of by the others. After a few moments one of the Ukrainians, a gruff black-haired man who doesn’t speak English, gets up, takes out his pocketknife, and joins me in my erasure.

  • • •

  Our last trip is a group one, with Ani, Sasha, and a few other people I haven’t met yet. This time we’re not in the surrounding towns—we’re underneath the city itself, exploring the old Cold War–era bunkers. Unlike visiting the suburban quarries, what we’re doing now is not legal, so we have to wait until nightfall before heading in. The bunkers aren’t stand-alone, instead being connected by the remnants of the oldest of the quarries, the ones that are below the city proper. Steve and I are scheduled to leave the next day, and this feels like a last hurrah, the end of an era.

  BEFORE.

  AFTER.

  After a couple hours of exploration we pop a hatch and climb up onto the street, happy with ourselves. There’s some grumbling among the others, though: Ani tells me it’s about the area we’re in right now, which is not a very good one, and it’s now late at night. Still, I’m not worried. There are seven of us. We walk down the street, chatting and laughing, and I hear footsteps behind us. I turn around and see a man half jogging, half walking up to us. The man is a giant. A very, very drunk giant. And a very, very drunk giant who does not seem happy with us. As he babbles at the others, swaying slightly back and forth as he does so, I make out the word angliski. This word is said in a tone that indicates he does not like angliski at all, and I determine it’s time to keep my mouth shut at all costs. I can’t tell if he’s looking for a fight or not, but even though there are seven of us, I’m really hoping it’s “not.” Now, if he actually does take a swing at us, I put the chances at about 90 percent that he’ll miss wildly, lose his balance, fall over, and immediately start snoring. But I don’t want to see what happens with that other 10 percent.

  The others attempt to pacify the giant until finally his companions usher him away and we get a move on back to the car. There are only five seats in the car, and no hope of squeezing in any more because of all the photo gear people have with them, which leaves two of us to find another way home. Since I like nothing more than to stroll through unfamiliar city stre
ets, I volunteer for pedestrian duty. Sasha, who as host feels duty-bound to protect me, insists on being the other person to walk.

  Sasha is still a bit shaken from the earlier encounter. “Moe. Listen. If what happens with that man happens again, we are running,” he tells me. “You are not speaking English and we are running.” But as it happens, we make it back to Sasha’s without incident, and the next day Steve and I leave the Ukraine.

  • • •

  When I was in high school, the Ku Klux Klan used to rally at City Hall every year, which was a few blocks from my school. We’d cut class, the teachers all but encouraging us to do so, and head over to yell, throw stuff, and otherwise think we were fighting them and what they represented. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that the reason the Klan chose my very liberal college town for this rally was precisely because they hoped to provoke a fight. But I still didn’t understand why this would be a bad thing.

  Later on it came together for me. In one New York neighborhood, Greenpoint, a local kid started an anti-fascist organization when there was an uptick in Nazi graffiti in the mid-2000s. I read their Facebook page, and it finally made sense. The page starts:

  For the fascist, violence is a happy condition and fits with their view of the world, where war and military struggle are understood as part of the human condition. For anti-fascists, violence is not part of their world view, they do not seek to create a society where violence is natural or commonplace, violence is not something the antifascist can glorify.