At the entrance of School 124 —not very different from the entrances to a parking lot— silence reigns. There is no running around the hall or childish laughter, not even a janitor to welcome the students. To find the first children you have to go down three flights of stairs, just over fifty steps. And it is there, 10 meters underground, where life grows green again. Swarms of children run through the hallways or wait their turn in the canteen. There are flowers painted on the walls and a soldier standing guard at the entrance. “Welcome to the Safe School”says its director, alluding to the center’s nickname. It was built in just nine months and is now one of the 21 underground schools in Kharkiv, the second city of Ukrainelocated 40 kilometers from the russian border and bombarded almost every day by the Kremlin’s missiles and drones.
He air raid terror It has been part of daily life in Kharkov for four years, where there are still many closed shops or public buildings with boarded-up windows. Shortly after entering school, the alarm rings. air raid siren. Grim and strident like a saw. Underground, few are moved, but the public address system reminds students and teachers not to come to the surface until the danger passes. Since the beginning of the large-scale invasion, the 78% of the city’s schools have suffered some type of damageaccording to the Ministry of Education. Four have been completely destroyed. Others have seen how the blast wave or shrapnel from the bombings burst windows or roofs. Almost half operate from 2022 only remotely; the rest follow a mixed regime with some face-to-face classes.
Several children in the canteen of School 124 in Kharkiv, opened in September 2025. / Ricardo Mir from France
“More and more young families are returning to the city and parents want children to be able to study in person. In schools like this they can do it safely,” says the Minister of Education, Natalia Borobiova. Its construction has been financed with public money and European donations. “For the Ministry of Education, the priority at this time is that children can socialize and receive psychological assistance”. For them, the war has not only brought fear, death and destruction, with many families scattered or broken. It has also been synonymous with isolation and seclusion. “Many children have panic attacks y anxiety pictures. It is very important that they can interact and communicate with their colleagues, in a few weeks you will see how their performance improves. mental health”says the school director, Serhiy Makieiev.
One of the 16 classrooms at School 124 in Kharkiv, which has 1,458 students and was built underground to escape Russian bombing. / Ricardo Mir from France
The city has had to be creative to adapt to new circumstances. Currently 21 of its 187 schools are underground. They accommodate about 20,000 students. The first one opened in September 2023, a year and a half after the start of the invasion, in a metro station and was initially met with skepticism. A feeling that has changed as the war has taken hold. Today there are seven schools in the metro stations, another six in air raid shelters and eight — like Colegio Seguro — have been built underground in record time. Other European countries bordering Russia have taken note and are trying to learn from its model. A delegation of Estonia.
Culture and health underground
It’s not just him educational system the one who seeks refuge in the burrows of Kharkiv, the one who was capital of Ukraine between 1919 and 1934, during its first three decades as a Soviet republic. The city is currently building a underground hospital of 3,000 square meters. In parallelcinemas, theaters, concert halls and exhibitionsas well as some bars and restaurants, have begun operating underground.
Among them, the Teatro Shevchenkothe most important and oldest in the city, which is about to celebrate a century of history. In October 2025 he moved his shows to building basement where it is located in the center of the city, after three years of closed curtains. The municipality banned shows after the invasion for fear that the theater would be bombed, as happened in Mariupol. “For a long time we looked for an underground space where we could operate with minimal security conditions. We did crowdfunding and even received municipal funds, but it was impossible to find a suitable place,” explains Rita Kornivshchenko, the person in charge of its programming.
Small and uncomfortable
The solution is far from perfect. The new theater occupies the space that was previously used as a cloakroom on the ground floor of the building. From the 850 spectators that the original stalls housed, it has gone down to only 120. “Everyone is quite tired of having to live underground to be able to enjoy a minimum of cultural lifebut at least the restrictions have been eased. The new ones are very small and uncomfortableand the audience you can get in is quite small,” says Kornivshchenko.
Rita Kornivshchenko, programmer at the Shevchenko Theater in Kharkiv, in the stalls of the stage set up in the theater’s basement. / Ricardo Mir from France
The war has also altered the city demographicswhich had 1.4 million inhabitants before the invasion. Many urbanites have fled the bombings; Instead, people have arrived from the towns in the provincewhere Russian military pressure is even greater. “New arrivals are less interested in culture or they don’t want to spend money on these things because life is complicated,” adds the Shevchenko Theater programmer.
Despite all the difficulties, Kharkiv’s underground life is a deliberate form of resistance in front of the Russian ambitions to empty the city and ultimately conquer it, something he already tried to do without success in 2022. “Staying here is a reckless decision because they can kill you at any moment, but we accept it because this is our home and we want to continue existing,” says Kornivshchenko.
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