History is sometimes right under our feet—you just have to look closely.

Here, for example, is a manhole cover from the early 1900s, made at Nikolai von Ditmar’s factory (now the “Svitlo Shakhtarya” factory), lying on an ordinary street in Kharkiv.

There are plenty of manhole covers like this in Kharkiv; some date back to the 1920s and have the same shape, but with the name “von Ditmar” knocked off the casting mold, using a mix of modern and pre-1918 spelling. The main thing is to watch your step. You can read more about Kharkiv’s manhole covers here.