I’m sure you’re growing accustomed to my city history blogging, so I’m going to mix it up a little. Today the Azamara Quest docked in Odesa, Ukraine and I took the opportunity to descend into a little known aspect of the city’s experience in WWII. Literally. But before we get to that I would like to say a few words on the city because it does tie into the story of the Odesa Catacombs (Катасомбе in Russian. I think.)
The Ottoman Turks settled Odesa as a base of operations in order to more easily raid the inland cities. The port flourished as a slave trading market selling the people who were captured during these raids. The city was properly founded by the Russians after they took the city in the Russian-Turkish War. Catherine the Great figured she could not name her new town after the Turkish stronghold (after all she had just captured it from them) so she decided to name it after the ancient Greek settlement she figured was in about that location: Odesus. Her court, ever the flatterers, told her that as a Czarina she shouldn’t let the name be masculine as she was a woman, so she changed it to Odesa. The city was designed by the same Dutch Architect who laid out Manhattan on the grid system, so the city is wonderfully easy to navigate. Catherine also declared the city a tax free zone, which is where the catacombs first come into play in Odesa’s history. Because there were originally next to no trees in the area (French gardeners later planted trees along the streets and in the areas for picturesque shade), all of the houses are built out of sandstone; and in order to promote settlement one of Catherine’s economic advisers allowed the people to mine for their housing materials directly under their houses, mandating that the quarries go at least 15 feet deep. Anyway, this led to the creation of a spider web of interconnecting tunnels beneath the city of Odesa. They’re nearly impossible to navigate if you don’t know your way around (to this day one or two kids die per year getting lost even though the entrances are sealed) but, for those who did, the tunnels became a smuggling network. Even though Odesa was a tax free port, goods that left the city had to be paid for. So merchants would send 90% of their goods through the catacombs with smugglers for a small fee, pay taxes on the other 10% as they left legally, and pick up everything else at a predetermined village since the catacombs extend through the countryside as well.
This brings us to WWII.
As part of Operation Barbarossa the combined German and Romanian troops were to cross the Danube and take Odesa and her nearby oil refineries. The siege of Odesa went on for three months before their meager force was redirected to Sevastapol in order to better defend a more important area. During the time of the Siege the Odesans came up with some seriously creative methods of defending their city. They put cardboard planes on the ground to trick the Axis forces into bombing those instead of their real air force. Additionally, they painted their planes to look like the German bombers and would leave early in the morning to go bomb the Germans and return promptly at 6 AM. They had to return at 6 so that they didn’t get shot down, as the Odesan troops knew that any German planes flying over at 6 AM were really Ukrainian. The Germans called this the “Guten morgen”attack as they were so confused. And of course, they built their own tanks.
In reality they were tin plated tractors, but the Germans didn’t know that until they destroyed one. The Odesans would make it look like they were firing shells when really they had next to no artillery capabilities by having a guy fire shells behind the tank to create the illusion of tank fire. However the city was eventually taken and held for 2 ½ years. During this period there was a dual administration between the Germans and Romanians since the Germans didn’t really trust the Romanians to administrate properly. This led to stuff like having two separate, autonomous Gestapos. There were Italian troops occupying the area as well, but we were told that the Odesans didn’t really have a problem with them since the Italians would have rather eaten good food and chased women then fight. It may be a bit of a stereotype, but that’s what my guide said. Anyway, for the defense of the city, the removed Soviet Army left behind some guys to start a resistance movement; and these guys went underground. And that begins the interesting portion of the history of the catacombs (it makes the whole smugglers aspect look boring anyway)…
Trust me, there are catacombs beneath this picture
The Odesa resistance movement was a group of specially trained and equipped men and women whose job it was to be a pain in the ass to the Nazis. They occupied the tunnels beneath unoccupied countryside and fields since the Nazis would have killed the entire street of any family discovered to have resistance fighters hiding in their catacombs. They kept special equipment and maps to navigate the navigable portions of the tunnels (the catacombs happen to be very prone to tunnels and collapse), which meant that even after the Nazis, discovered their most commonly utilized entrances and diverted 10,000 men from the front to guard the tunnels they still got out and did their business in the towns. In fact in one battle between the Nazis and the Resistance, 300 Nazis died as compared to 8 Odesans.
Once again, there are issues with orientation, sorry about that.
The conditions of catacomb living were atrocious. The resistance fighters, men and women, had to put on makeup and change clothing as soon as they got out of the tunnels because they could be easily identified by their sallow, gaunt appearance (caused by living in the darkness for weeks at a time) and by their distinctive, moldy smell (from the dampness of the limestone catacombs). Smoke from the kitchens and laundry rooms was vented into unused tunnels so that it could diffuse into the environment to avoid detection. Those stoves were used to make a thin, fatty gruel that the fighters subsisted off of for months at a time. They originally kept only enough food for 75 for six months, but they were underground for much longer and in much greater numbers than could have been anticipated. This left them woefully undersupplied and forced them to stretch out what they had for as long as possible. Water was collected from the catacombs themselves, but this same water left everything damp and moldy and created the problem of flooding. Laundry was accomplished by a female doctor of German descent who lived underground with the men by baking the clothing in red hot pots, which both dried and disinfected them by killing any lice that might be living underground with the men. The walls were painted with codes telling the catacomb dwellers which passages to seal in order to direct the drafts of the tunnels towards uninhabited areas in the event of a gas attack. All of this was done with the resistance motto in mind:
КРОВь ЗА КРОВь
СМЄРТь ЗА СМЄРТь
This translates, according to our guide, as:
Blood for Blood
Death for Death
So yeah. These guys were amazing. In Euro you always hear about the French resistance if you hear about any resistance, and these guys have the French beat by a mile. I’ll leave you with a slideshow of the other pictures I took in the catacombs. Some of them aren’t great, but I almost feel like that makes clearer the conditions that these guys were living. Anywhere there’s Russian I have turned to my BFF Google Translate, but I have no way of checking it; so keep that in mind as you read. And please don't complain about the fact that some of these make questionable sense
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