Can you imagine?

Odessa is made of limestone. When the city was being built people bought or otherwise acquired a little piece of land, started digging in the middle of it, and used the limestone from the ground to build around the outside, leaving a courtyard in the middle. That's why there is a well/flower-pot-looking round thing in the middle of all the courtyards here and why a few buildings are sinking. (People dug too much and didn't leave enough foundation). The digging would eventually lead to the neighbors' tunnels, and now there's a whole labyrinth under Odessa. Depending on who you ask, there are between 1000 and 3000 km of tunnels going two or even sometimes three stories down. The rich people made underground ('air-conditioned') party rooms, and the really rich people had an orchestra in the first layer underground and the party room a level below that. Back when Odessa was a tax-free port, the catacombs were used to smuggle things inland. In villages outside the city, peasants dug tunnels under the fields to get limestone to sell, and when the Nazis occupied Odessa during the Great Patriotic War (aka World War II), those catacombs were home to the Soviet resistance.

You can tour part of the resistance catacombs but only with a guide, which was fine by me because even though there are now lights and exit signs it is dark and creepy down there and the thought of making a wrong turn and getting lost gives me actual chills. There were a bunch of school groups ("Oh my," said my guide. "So many children. This is disaster.") but sound does not carry down there and we only had to get a few turns away before we couldn't hear them at all--which is also kinda creepy.

The area of resistance catacombs was huge and there were various different groups operating basically independently. Some were fairly successful in that they killed a lot of Germans and Romanians. One particularly unsuccessful group had a traitor who sold them out to the Nazis, who promptly sealed all their exits. ("Can you imagine?", my guide kept saying.) Waiting to be rescued, they started rationing food. Someone started hoarding and so they killed him. Two soldiers were caught doing something sexual, so they killed them. Then they ran out of food, so they ate the dead people. Then people started going crazy, so they killed and eventually ate them. By the time the German occupation ended, there was only one guy left alive. He couldn't walk, or talk, or see, and he died about two weeks after he was rescued. (Two of the people had been keeping journals, which was forbidden but helped keep them less crazy, and is where that story came from.)

Even though we were speaking English, my guide saved the cannibalism story for the taxi ride back to the city. "If the children would hear, can you imagine?"