Abandoned buildings — Ukraine
Abandoned buildings — Ukraine. 3 places in the catalogue, each with coordinates, the story behind it and a danger level from white to black.
The Adzhimushkay quarries
The Adzhimushkay Quarries constitute an extensive subterranean limestone quarry system (comprising the Great and Small Adzhimushkay labyrinths) located on the outskirts of Kerch near the settlement of Adzhimushkay on the Kerch Peninsula, Crimea. Having supplied coquina building stone since antiquity, these catacombs became the site of one of World War II's most harrowing subterranean sieges: from May to October 1942, surrounded Soviet rear-guard units and local civilians mounted an unrelenting 170-day defense trapped in absolute darkness, enduring lethal dehydration, structural demolitions, and continuous chemical asphyxiation assaults by the German Wehrmacht.
Chufut-Kale
A cave town on a Crimean plateau, inhabited from the sixth century and abandoned in the nineteenth. The name means Jewish fortress — the Karaites were the last to live here. Houses, cisterns, a prison and the mausoleum of the khan's daughter Canike Hanım are cut into the rock. Beside it lies the Karaite cemetery of Balta Tiymez, "the axe shall not touch" — a protected oak grove where felling was absolutely forbidden, which is why it outlived every wood around it.
Pripyat
A ghost city near the Chernobyl nuclear plant, evacuated in 1986 after the disaster. Its panel-block apartments, ferris wheel, and overgrown streets are a symbol of Soviet life frozen mid-motion.