Inside Murmansk's secret underground WWII bomb shelter network

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A legend that turned out not so impossible.

In the early 2000s, a note in the local tabloid press spoke of a supposedly vast underground facility. The author dubbed it a so-called Fairy-Tale City and claimed it was hidden beneath the urban fabric. At the time, it read like a classic scare story. Every city has its myths. Yet the years rolled by, and the rumor that once prompted smirks unexpectedly led to tangible finds.

When legends start lining up

By 2011, a handful of scattered urban tales began to fit together. Different sources pointed to the same district. After sifting through the clues and considering what kind of subterranean works could have been built there in the 20th century, researchers narrowed the search to several locations.

In one of them, they uncovered an inclined passage dropping almost twenty meters. The descent ended in water. That became the starting point for a long series of discoveries.

As later emerged, at the very start of the war, local air-defense headquarters in major cities set urgent tasks to build bomb shelters for civilians and protected command posts to keep urban infrastructure running. One such site was begun in the Arctic, in the city of Murmansk.

New entrances and first conclusions

Over the following years, the same area yielded more descents, ventilation shafts, and emergency exits. The distance between the outermost points reached about half a kilometer. The water level shifted from year to year. In hard freezes they pushed on through icy water; in summer they switched to an inflatable mat. Once they backed out when a methane bubble rose up from beneath the floor.

In all, eight main entrances and around a dozen shafts were identified. They did not manage to explore everything, but it was enough to grasp the scale.

What lies beneath the rock

The underground spaces sit at an average depth of about 25 meters, and in some places 27. Surviving construction details indicate the facility was commissioned in 1947. It was driven by vertical sinking: shafts were sunk down and horizontal corridors bored out from them. Above each shaft stood a reinforced-concrete block with ventilation systems and auxiliary rooms.

The ceilings were strengthened with I-beams, with boilerplate steel sheets laid between them. The slab thickness reached four meters. On top went protective mattresses and a soil layer — a typical scheme for shelters designed to withstand blast and shrapnel.

Starting point: an inconspicuous shed in a courtyard

The first site that turned searching into a proper investigation was a small structure tucked inside a residential courtyard. It looked like a routine transformer kiosk but hid an inclined descent. Inside stood a small ventilation cyclone. The stairway headed down; midway, a little door opened onto the next flight.

The descent led to an approach gallery — a corridor that once carried incoming air. At the end of the gallery was a ventilation shaft with four overpressure valves from the 1940s. Under a blast wave, they would close automatically.

A camouflaged emergency exit

The shaft also served as an emergency exit. It was overlapped by concrete slabs, the top disguised as ordinary yard surface. Nearby was the entrance to the ventilation block above the shaft. The original 1940s hermetic door survived only in part: later it was swapped for a newer model, and in the 1990s removed entirely.

Filtration and overpressure

Beyond the doorway lay a small airlock with two passages. Most doors had been taken off by then, leaving only the frames. The left passage led to four PFP-1000 dust filters. The main ventilation equipment was deeper down, in the lower blocks.

Past the filters, a duct carried air downward along the shaft. Next to it was a room with mounts for compressed-air cylinders — there used to be roughly fifteen. They maintained overpressure inside.

Traces of former systems and signs of the past

Elsewhere in the block, a small overpressure valve remained set in the wall. Farther on was another airlock. Above one opening survived the faint outline of a hammer-and-sickle emblem. Beyond it was a room that had held around a dozen air-receiver cylinders. In places, the old whitewash peels — the concrete seems to shed in flakes.

Descent into the deepest shaft

The main passage leads to a shaft that drops 27 meters. From a ceiling braced with beams hung a small water tank. Twelve stair flights went down. On one level was the entrance to the third-lift pump room. Here, a 1940s hermetic door remained — the only survivor of the original three. Beyond it ran a gallery leading to another preserved hermetic door and an expansion tank.

The edge of what has been explored

Lower down, a few flights later, a niche of the second-lift pump room came into view — the equipment has long since been removed. Deeper still, the stairs meet water. Over the years the level has risen and fallen dozens of times. Sometimes it was possible to go nine flights down; at other times, ten or eleven.

Once, conditions allowed access to the lower corridors, but that is a different story.