Kyiv's Zhukiv island

One of my many walks on Zhukiv, this was a winter one. I wanted to wander around even more, explore some new paths and perhaps get into the locally famous Stalin's tunnel — provided the ice had enough strength to hold me. A friend joined me, so there were two of us for the ice to hold.

There was a new sign near the dam on the entrance to the island, advertising a discotheque in such a way that nothing could be understood:

One of several footbridges of Zhukiv. This one was rather unknown.

This bridge was not necessary, because a tarmac-paved dam for cars existed nearby, crossing the same water body. It had even a bus route passing on it. Upd.: This bridge has been stolen to be sold as scrap metal in January 2009, making the above a historic photo.

The water body under that bridge is called Vita river. In a remarkable display of silence, fishermen were sitting on its ice.

Here is a cool story about my first exploration of Zhukiv ostriv: I was walking on the upper-mentioned dam road, and was offered a ride by a passing car. I accepted, and got transported to Kyiv's Vydubychi by a kind driver. As the result, I didn't stumble upon the tunnel, because it was not visible from the passenger's seat. It was not until this time five years later that I finally came to the tunnel.

We approached the tunnel from its end, which turned out to be level to the ground. No ladders were required whatsoever, contradicting some bloggers of that time.

We started walking on the roof, rising higher over ground — slowly but surely with every step. It became clear that it was going to end soon — a pity, because the tunnel was such a nice elevated path among the trees.

The total length of this unfinished object is just around 600 meters. We reached the western end of the tunnel soon. This was the view from above, and we were deciding on which way to go down from. We needed to climb off to the left, but it required some hanging on the rods. We could have easily climbed off to the right, but it was water between the tunnel and the ground from that side. We finally climbed off to the left, which was a nice exercise.

Currently defunct website razvedka-vmf.kiev.ua told the story (archived here), that kids were going to school over this roof in 1950-es.

This tunnel had always been an object of increased interest among people like me — who loved to walk on all sorts of outskirts, and perhaps some industrial areas. There were various names of the tunnel among them: the cryptic «object nr.1», the humorous «Stalin's metro», or the literal «tunnel under Dnieper». Such people were telling each other not to post interesting objects to the «open internet» in order to avoid excessive popularisation.

It turned out that it was already well known among «common» people. We met a whole winter picnic of people near the tunnel entrance. One guy asked me if I knew what the hell this tunnel was. He also said that he had lived here for a zillion of years but still had no clue what it was. I poured all the info from the internet out to him, adding that it was not completely fact-checked.

So, the tunnel did not need our help in hiding it from the public. It was way too late to try keeping it a secret — the tunnel had been one of locations for a silly music video «The end of holidays» directed by Serhiy Lysenko for the most popular soviet band «Kino» — back in the 1986! It is only the lazy who hasn't been here.

We inspected the ice strength again, with it actually turning out pretty high. We weighed in at around 130 kilograms together, and the ice held us very well.

and headed somewhere else, the general direction being back home. Here's a photo of the tunnel entrance.

A view of Vita river's branch nearby.

It were the pre-navigator times. We went almost randomly, using memories from some maps that I once saw. It was good for us that it was cold, because we could simply cross water bodies as if they were tarmac. Bones were resting in the forest, probably belonging to those who came here without a map in spring! (That was a joke. Bones real, though).

A much less beautiful moss of a mildly interesting dark red color was abundant near the riverbanks.

It was from afar that we saw something burning. We headed towards the fire through a wide meadow and saw this strange circular pit:

I have no idea what it was. Another friend suggested that it could be made by tolkienists, but I don't think so. Not important, anyway.

We reached the first fire. All of these fires were started by people believing that burning grass is beneficial for that grass, despite objections from the scientists. Take a look at one of such firestarters:

A ring of fire around a tree, which fortunately didn't catch fire.

We decided to stop the fire, and did our best at it. At first we were simply stomping the fire with our boots, until their soles started to smoke and to feel warm from inside. Then we found a piece of garbage — a little door broken off some small furniture — and threw it on the fire instead.

While we were playing firemen, some passing car honked at us from a distance. We did not understand what it meant. It could be supportive as well as the opposite. The driver did not make it clear.

Smoked to the max, we continued our way back home. A zoom ahead showed us some elderly women putting more grass on fire. What the hell was wrong with these people.

We made our pretty significant input into putting the fire down. Took a photo of ourselves in the dark mirror of water, standing on another footbridge.

This footbridge.

After that, we went home by these two halves of a tree.

It was a nice walk.