Balaklava

Balaklava - darkometer rating : 7 - UPDATE 2018: Well, Russian-annexed Crimea, and hence Balaklava, are now definitely part of Russia again. BUT: a friend of mine has managed to visit the site, with the help of a Russian friend, travelling through Russia, of course (all connections with Ukraine remain severed), and he confirmed that the place is visitable again, and is commodified as a kind of museum. His photos are evidence of this. -------------------- Before these recent political/military developments in the Crimea the word Balaklava was probably more familiar to English speakers as the name of a kind of head cover – but this entry is about the place of the same name in Crimea (now Russia , formerly Ukraine ). It's the place where this kind of head gear was apparently invented originally, primarily for protection against the winter cold – the secondary use as the prototypical bank-robber's camouflage came later … As a dark tourism site it is an attraction for the following reason: Balaklava is the site of a former Soviet underground submarine shelter inside a mountainside on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast near Sevastopol. Code-named "Facility 825", it was driven into the rocks near the small fishing village of Balaklava, which was sealed off and turned into top-secret Cold War site, one of the most secret of the whole era in fact. Its purpose was primarily to hide the Soviet Black Sea Fleet submarines in an A-bomb-safe shelter, where they could also be serviced, and nuclear warheads and torpedoes stored. It was huge, several square miles of spacious underground tunnels, workspaces, storerooms, and, of course, the docks for the submarines (up to nine submarines could be held at any one time).