Green level — mystical places on the map
Real places with nothing on their record — nothing that is reported to have happened to anybody. A history, a rumour, an atmosphere, a building with a past: the story is about the place itself rather than about what it does to whoever walks in. Most of the catalogue sits here, and that is the honest answer rather than a dull one.
101 placesAbout the danger levels
The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga
A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.
The Adzhimushkay quarries
Limestone workings outside Kerch where, from May to October 1942, a garrison of soldiers and civilians held out after the city fell and they went underground. The Germans blew in the roofs and pumped gas into the galleries. Of some thirteen thousand people, a few hundred survived. The diaries found in the workings afterwards are among the hardest documents of that war. Part of the quarries is a museum today; the rest is closed, because remains are still being found there.
The Dead Road
Construction Projects 501 and 503: the Salekhard–Igarka railway, driven across the polar tundra by prison labour between 1947 and 1953. After Stalin's death the work was abandoned in a single day. Some seven hundred kilometres of track remain in the tundra, along with locomotives, bridges and camp compounds with their watchtowers and barracks — all still standing, because removing it would have cost more than leaving it. It is called the dead road not for its ghosts: it leads nowhere and never did.
Kapustin Yar
A missile range in the Astrakhan region, closed off since 1946 so thoroughly that the full set of stories grew up around it that grew around Area 51 in the United States: downed craft, underground hangars, tests of unknown machinery. Some of the rumours have an obvious source — rocketry really was tested here and a nuclear device detonated in 1957, and for years any flash over the steppe had no official explanation. The range is still in operation.
The Bloop
In 1997 hydrophones belonging to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded an ultra-low-frequency sound in the South Pacific loud enough to be picked up by sensors three thousand miles apart. Its profile resembled a biological one, and for two decades the Bloop was the leading exhibit for anyone who believes in undiscovered giants in the ocean. NOAA settled it in 2012: an icequake, an iceberg fracturing off Antarctica. The sound stopped being a mystery but remains one of the best-known audio files in internet history.
The Charyn Canyon
A canyon in Kazakhstan some hundred and fifty kilometres long, one stretch of which is called the Valley of Castles — sedimentary rock cut by wind and water into towers and walls up to three hundred metres. On its floor stands a grove of Sogdian ash that survived the Ice Age, a species found almost nowhere else. Kazakh tradition fills the canyon with spirits, and locals advise against sleeping on the floor of it — not for mystical reasons, but because the water rises without warning.
Mangystau
A region on the eastern shore of the Caspian where chalk outliers stand in the desert like the ruins of cities, and ridges of perfectly round stone spheres emerge from the ground — concretions up to three metres across. Beket-Ata is here too, an underground mosque cut into a chalk hill by a Sufi preacher in the eighteenth century; a steady stream of pilgrims comes to it, and tradition requires the night before a visit to be spent in the neighbouring valley.
The Salbyk Kurgan
A royal kurgan in Khakassia ringed by upright slabs of Devonian sandstone weighing up to fifty tons — the stone was hauled seventy kilometres. Before excavation the mound stood twenty-five metres high. Inside was a burial with several attendants, killed, to all appearances, for the purpose. The valley around it is called the Valley of the Kings: there are several dozen kurgans here and most are untouched.
Mount Belukha
The highest point of the Altai, which the Altaians call Uch-Sumer and hold to be forbidden: one did not climb it, or speak loudly at its foot. Nicholas Roerich came here in 1926 and tied the mountain to Belovodye and Shambhala; his paintings made Belukha the centre of a Russian esoteric pilgrimage that has not dried up. The peak stands almost equidistant from three oceans — a fact the esotericists are fond of citing.
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 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.
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.