- The underground shelters gypsies, spongers, political refugees, and professional hermits. These people usually enter the underground through the grates of heating and rubbish collecting systems.
...old bomb shelters, subway lines, dead bodies of tramps, oceanographic storage rooms...
- "Imagine walking along endless corridors," recalls Mikhailov, "something dripping from the ceiling, the uneven light of torches. And all of sudden you find yourself in a room full of tanks of formalin, containing various sea monsters."
...secret subway lines built by Stalin and never opened to the public, a sealed labyrinth under Solyanka street which may hold mass graves, a hastily abandoned lab with chemical gear on the walls and crystals of some kind, a criminal lair from the time of the czars...
- Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a pre-revolutionary explorer of Moscow ... wrote that long ago an owner of a criminal den built a tunnel leading to the underground waters. Inside the den was a pipe through which criminals threw out the corpses of those they had robbed and murdered. The Diggers made their way into one such tunnel and found among broken skulls a silver ring and a kisten, an ancient weapon similar to a large metal mace.
...mysterious weapon-toting figures in fatigues who talk to no one, a three-thousand-seat bunker under a ruined cathedral sealed by the government from amateur explorers (who were nevertheless asked to remove an object encrusted with Communist slogans which the priests seemed to regard as a demonic artifact), people in monastic robes enacting rituals around a strangely shaped stone altar...
At some point, you've got be a little skeptical about the more exotic reports. But not about the lost library of Czar Ivan III. No one knows where to find the underground chamber built by an Italian architect to hold the czar's wife's dowry of precious ancient scrolls from Byzantium, but it's real...
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