Cooking varenyky in the catacombs

Deep below Odesa there’s a 2,500km network of tunnels - and I joined a group of young civic activists for a Ukrainian dinner down in the catacombs.

'Would you like to cook varenyky in the Odesa catacombs on Saturday night, with some guys from a civic NGO?' The whatsapp message from my friend and fixer, Artem, was intriguing to say the least: how could I refuse? He told me to bring warm clothes, decent boots, a plate and some cutlery, and a flashlight. We would meet up with the rest of the group at a lay-by and drive together to the village just north of Odesa where there was an entrance to climb down to the tunnels.

A young woman joined us in the car: she told me she had been born in Moscow, where she had lived for most of her life until 2014, and the illegal annexation of Crimea. She and her Ukrainian mother had left Russia for Kyiv, and then Odesa, and she had stayed there ever since. She had learned the Ukrainian language and volunteered for a group making camoflauge nets for the army. We drove through town, the streets unnaturally dark because of the blackout, and through a small village where we pulled up on a verge, unpacking bags of food, folding chairs and portable gas stoves from the back of the cars.

Leading the way was Roman Mauser, a young engineer who's been exploring the vast network of tunnels and caves since he was a teenager. He mapped the laberynthine tunnels and started up a tour company to show visitors around. The New Yorker wrote a piece about him at the start of the fullscale war - when he and some other local volunteers had prepared some of the underground caverns as air raid shelters, fitting them out with lights, water and boxes of dried food. During the second world war, Ukrainian partisans had hidden out for months deep below ground, surviving on food and water which was ferried down through wells.

He led our little group down a verge and through a gap in the rocks, turning on flashlights to light the sudden darkness. "Don't get lost!" he warned, making sure that everyone was keeping up. We clambered over piles of stones and ducked under low hanging rocks until the path in front became much wider and flatter, and opened out into a cavernous space where some of the group had already begun setting up a trestle table and some camping chairs. One girl began lighting candles and someone else fired up a camping stove to boil water for the varenyky. There was even a small projector sending out images of the Ukrainian countryside onto a screen. "Safest place in Odesa", someone remarked.

One of the young men was busy rolling pancakes around cream cheese and smoked salmon, while another girl began unpacking boxes of carrot and beetroot salads, tubs of sour cream and a loaf of bread, a veritable feast. Before dinner, though, Roman proposed a short excursion so that we could see a bit more of the catacombs, promising there was some graffiti scratched onto the walls dating back more than 150 years. It was quite the scramble, and at one point a bat flew towards us, which sent me rapidly in the opposite direction, but Roman's encyclopaedic knowledge of underground Odesa and its history was fascinating to hear.

We reached the tunnel with the hundred year old graffiti, a young man called Philip boasting about his sexual antics with a local girl in quite explicit language - while another young man, presumably a rival, slagged him off on another wall, for all the world like a contemporary social media spat. Roman showed us where the partisans had holed up, and where people had somehow even managed to keep animals. Stooping down, he picked up a bullet case from the dusty floor, which must have dated back to the early 1940s, and put it on a little shelf in the rock.

We clambered back towards the dinner table, by now covered in plates of salad, pancakes and cheese, just in time for the first helping of varenyky, which had been carefully handmade the previous evening. They were hot, and filled with comforting cabbage and mushroom, and the dollop of sour cream on top was just right. It was impossible not to take another helping or two of salad alongside. There were more varenyky to come, some stuffed with potato or meat and finally cherries, which no one could really manage but everyone decided to try 'just one, maybe two', with the last of the sour cream. They boiled water for tea and there was definitely a bottle or two of wine. The young people were a fascinating bunch, artists and musicians and civic activists, who had all been friends and local volunteers for many years. Even though their city was coming under almost daily attack and spent many hours in the darkness of blackout, they were determined to continue with these small celebrations of Ukrainian traditions and culture.

Artem began playing some songs on his guitar and all the leftovers were efficiently divided up into takeaway boxes for the next day's lunch. The table was folded down as quickly as it had been put up, the candles and projector screen stowed away, and every last scrap of rubbish was collected into bags. Artem would have sung the night away but it was getting late, and there was the drive back into town to manage before curfew. We trekked back along the narrow passageways, very glad of the expert guide to show the way, and emerged back outside, shivering suddenly in the icy wind. It was such an unexpected evening, sharing plates of varenyky down there in the catacombs: the safest place in Odesa and certainly the most unique.