All places
The full catalogue of approved places. Sort by rating, recency or discussion, and narrow it down by category.
282 places
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.
Ayu-Dag, the Bear Mountain
A volcano that never happened on Crimea's south coast: the magma rose but never broke out and set as a dome. From the sea the mountain reads as an enormous bear drinking. A Crimean legend takes that literally — the leader of a bear pack turned to stone, punished for trying to drink the sea dry rather than let a runaway girl go. Remains of a medieval monastery and fortifications survive on it, and the magnetic field in places pulls a compass off true.
The Valley of Ghosts on Demerdzhi
A slope of the Crimean mountain Demerdzhi scattered with hundreds of stone pillars up to twenty-five metres high — conglomerate from which the rain has washed the softer rock. In mist and at sunset the shapes read as people and animals, and the outlines shift with the light. A Crimean Tatar tradition explains them by the curse of a blacksmith who settled on the mountain; the name means blacksmith. In 1966 the mountain slid and buried part of the village of Lavanda.
The Onega Petroglyphs and the Demon
Carvings on the shore rocks of Lake Onega, cut five or six thousand years ago. The best-known figure is the Bes — a humanoid nearly two and a half metres tall, split down the middle by a natural fissure. Monks of the Murom monastery cut a Christian cross over it in the fifteenth century to neutralise it, and both marks remain side by side on the stone, which makes this rock a rare document of one faith writing over another.
The Solovetsky Labyrinths
Boulder spirals on the Solovetsky Islands, laid out three or four thousand years ago. There are around thirty, the largest twenty-five metres across. There are no branches — one winding path to the centre and back. The accepted explanation ties them to burial rites and to keeping a soul from finding its way back to the living: stone heaps with burnt bone are found beside them.
The Denisova Cave
A cave in the Altai where, in 2008, DNA extracted from a child's finger bone revealed an entire unknown human species — the Denisovans. Their genes are still carried by people in Melanesia and Tibet, the Tibetans having inherited a variant that helps at altitude. One layer held the remains of a girl whose mother was Neanderthal and whose father was Denisovan — the only known first-generation person of two different human species.
The Putorana Plateau
A basalt plateau the size of Britain north of the Arctic Circle, cut by canyons and waterfalls, among them the highest in Russia. The nearest road is hundreds of kilometres away; access is by helicopter or water. The Evenks held the plateau to be the dwelling of the fire deity Khosedem and did not settle on it. It was formed by the Siberian Traps eruptions, linked to the Permian extinction — the largest in the planet's history.
The Ordinskaya Cave
The longest underwater gypsum cave in the world — over five kilometres of flooded galleries under the left bank at Kungur. The water is clear enough for fifty metres of visibility, and divers describe flying rather than diving. The cave has killed several experienced divers: the sumps offer no landmarks, and someone who loses the line does not find the way back. Locals kept clear of the sinkholes long before anyone arrived with tanks.
The Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)
A cave in Bashkortostan with wall paintings some seventeen thousand years old — mammoths, horses, rhinoceroses, laid down in ochre. Before its discovery in 1959 Palaeolithic painting was thought to exist only in Western Europe. In the Bashkir epic Ural-batyr the lake at its mouth is the entrance to the underworld, ruled by Shulgan, the hero's brother who went over to evil. The cave and the lake carry his name.
Orheiul Vechi
The limestone canyon of the Răut in Moldova, with a cave monastery cut into its sheer walls — cells, a chapel and a bell tower joined by passages through the rock. Monks lived here from the thirteenth century; the Soviet authorities closed it, and until the 1990s a single hermit remained in the caves. Below on the slope lie traces of Geto-Dacian fortifications and of a Golden Horde town that stood on the same ground.
Białowieża Forest
The last large stand of primeval lowland forest in Europe, on the Belarus–Poland border — what the whole continent was before the clearances. A wild herd of bison grazes here, rebuilt from some fifty animals after the last free-living one was shot in 1921. The trees reach fifty metres and some of the oaks are older than the Commonwealth. Baltic and Slavic mythology filled such forests with leshys and wood-maidens, and the guides here are happy to keep that going.
Gobustan
A rock massif outside Baku with more than six thousand petroglyphs, the oldest up to forty thousand years old. The gaval dash stands here too — the tambourine stone, a slab that gives a resonant note when struck and was evidently played. Thor Heyerdahl visited three times and argued that the boats depicted are related to Norwegian petroglyphs, deriving a Caucasian origin for the Scandinavians — a hypothesis specialists did not accept.
Lake Sevan
A high-altitude lake that supplies almost all of Armenia's fresh water. In Soviet times its level was deliberately dropped by nearly twenty metres for hydroelectricity, and what lay beneath came out: Bronze Age settlements, fortresses and necropolises. The Sevan peninsula was an island before that draining. The monastery of Sevanavank was founded in 874 by Princess Mariam, and tradition has it built by monks exiled from Echmiadzin for misconduct.
Lake Issyk-Kul
A non-freezing mountain lake in the Tien Shan with several drowned settlements beneath it, from Saka times through the middle ages. Divers have brought up bronze cauldrons, coins and courses of brickwork. One legend ties the lake to Tamerlane's grave, another to a monastery of Armenian brothers where, according to the Catalan Atlas of 1375, the relics of the apostle Matthew were kept. The last is taken seriously enough that expeditions still work the lake.
The Ustyurt Plateau
A stony desert between the Caspian and the Aral, breaking to the plain in escarpments a hundred and fifty metres high. From the air the Ustyurt arrows are visible — stone-built structures up to a kilometre long, noticed only in aerial survey in the 1980s. They are read as drive-hunting traps, but who built them is disputed, and estimates of their age run into thousands of years. The place is empty enough that several ungulate species presumed extinct were found here.
Barsa-Kelmes
A former island in the Aral Sea whose Kazakh name means "go and you will not return". As the sea retreated it stopped being an island and became part of a salt desert. In Soviet times it carried stories of time slips: people who left for a day and came back weeks later, watches running behind. They ran in the magazine Tekhnika — Molodyozhi in the 1980s, which is where they spread from. No instrumental confirmation ever appeared, and the place has since become a monument to an ecological catastrophe instead.
The Stone Graves
Granite ridges rising out of the flat Azov steppe like an island. By one account the Battle of the Kalka was fought here in 1223, and three captured princes were laid under a platform on which the Mongols feasted until they suffocated. The steppe around was for centuries set with stone women — Cuman figures raised over graves, of which only a fraction survives.
The Valley of Death on the Vilyuy
A stretch of the upper Vilyuy known to the Yakuts as Elyuyu Cherkechekh, the valley of the dead. Tradition places metal hemispheres in the ground there, warm inside, in which one can shelter from the cold — but whoever spends the night falls ill and dies soon after. The first written mentions of the cauldrons date to the nineteenth century. No expedition has found anything, including several in the 2000s with metal detectors; explanations range from outcrops of trap basalt to spent rocket stages.
The Chuchunya of Verkhoyansk
In the coldest inhabited place on earth, the Yakuts and Evens tell of the chuchunya — a tall man in skins who lives alone, steals reindeer and runs off at improbable speed. In the 1920s enough reports accumulated that the Academy of Sciences sent an expedition under Pyotr Dravert. Ethnographers suggest the figure stands on something real: outcasts and the remnants of vanished clans who took to living away from people.
The Braslav Lakes and the Tsmok
Three hundred lakes in northern Belarus, in whose folklore the tsmok lives — a water serpent, not quite a dragon and not quite a grass snake. Belarusian tradition makes him double-edged: he can pull a man under, or bring a household wealth if it feeds him milk. Lake Voloso, the deepest of the group, carries its own accounts of something troubling the nets; the water is clear enough to see the bottom ten metres down, which has not hindered the stories.
The Vishap Stones of the Gegham Mountains
On the high pastures of Armenia stand the vishaps — stone stelae up to five metres tall, carved as fish or wrapped in the hide of a bull. They are some four thousand years old and were set at springs and water channels. In Armenian mythology the vishap is a dragon that lives in the mountains and holds back the water, until the hero Vahagn defeats it. The stelae predate the written tradition, so who raised them and why is known only from the stone.
The Azass Cave and the Kuzbass Yeti
Mountain Shoria in southern Kuzbass is the setting of Russia's loudest wild-man story. From 2009 hunters reported tracks and silhouettes near the Azass Cave, and the regional authorities behaved unusually: a million-rouble reward, an international conference brought here in 2011, and a dedicated laboratory opened at the local university. Sceptics noted how neatly the surge of interest coincided with a push to develop tourism in a depressed district.
The Almasty of Kabardino-Balkaria
The Caucasus is the heartland of the Almasty, the Caucasian wild man: a creature some two metres tall covered in reddish hair which, by the accounts of mountain villagers, comes down to the sheepfolds and takes livestock. In the 1960s Professor Boris Porshnev collected testimony here for the Academy of Sciences and examined the case of Zana, a woman who lived in an Abkhaz village in the nineteenth century and whom locals held to be a captured Almasty. Her descendants were traced into the twentieth century; genetic analysis in 2015 found ordinary African ancestry.
Lake Khaiyr
A lake at the mouth of the Yana, famous since 1964, when a biological station worker, Nikolai Gladkikh, reported a creature on the shore with a small head on a long neck, black skin and a ridge along its back, eating grass. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed it and expeditions followed. The station's director later admitted the story had been invented. The retraction travelled far less well than the report, and Khaiyr is still listed among lake monsters.