Five stories below the streets of Odessa, there's a labyrinth of tunnels. 1,500 miles of them have provided, in the best of times, a challenge for urban explorers like Roman Mauser. In the worst of ...

The entrance to the catacombs was an opening in the ground with a circumference no bigger than a manhole. At first, I mistook it for a trash can. Entering the catacombs meant burrowing through a ...

Old stone mines underneath Odessa, Ukraine - which residents call the "catacombs" - have long sheltered the city's inhabitants in times of strife. They may do it again, as Russian forces approach the ...

The catacombs have a history to them, a history that, when you experience it up close and personal, is haunting. First we come to a cavern with several names written in Cyrillic on the wall, which my ...

WE ALL THINK we know what the absence of light looks like, but nothing prepared me for the totality of it. For four hours, I had been hiking, running, wading, shimmying and crawling deeper and deeper ...