People look at a tanker after it fell into a caved-in area on a road in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, July 27, 2013. No casualty was reported in the accident, according to local media. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

Members of Chinese Shaolin Temple Warrior Monks perform martial arts during the “Cultures of China, Festival of Spring” Gala in Toronto, Canada, on February 27, 2016. (Photo by Zou Zheng/Xinhua/Sipa USA)

A woman cries as she watches the coffin containing the body of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez be taken from the hospital, where he died on Tuesday, to a military academy in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, March 6, 2013. Seven days of mourning were declared, all schools were suspended for the week and friendly heads of state were expected for an elaborate funeral on Friday. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

Only the most intrepid urban explorers cross the tattered ruins of the old Iron Curtain to endure the excessive bureaucracy, military paranoia and freezing winds of the East to hunt for the ghosts of an empire. Rebecca Litchfield is one who couldn’t resist the haunting allure of the ruins of the Soviet Union.

“The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae now found in the wild only in the Australian island state of Tasmania. The size of a small dog, it became the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world following the extinction of the thylacine in 1936. It is characterised by its stocky and muscular build, black fur, pungent odour, extremely loud and disturbing screech, keen sense of smell, and ferocity when feeding”. – Wikipedia. Photo: A Tasmanian Devil bears it's teeth at a quarantine facility August 31, 2005 in Hobart, Australia. (Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

“The Greek Civil War was fought from 1945 to 1949 between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece (ΔΣΕ) (Greek initials DSE), the military branch of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was the result of a highly polarized struggle between leftists and rightists which started in 1943 and targeted the power vacuum that the German-Italian occupation during World War II had created. One of the first conflicts of the Cold War, according to some analysts it represents the first example of a postwar Western interference in the internal politics of a foreign country, and for others, marked the first serious test of the theory of the so-called Churchill-Stalin percentages agreement. The first signs of the civil war occurred in 1942–1944, during the Occupation”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A Greek commando soldier, wearing a fur-collared jacket supplied by the Americans, waits for a guerrilla target to emerge during the Greek Civil War. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images). 22nd May 1948

In this Friday, January 9, 2015 photo, bathhouse worker Omid Riahi, 39, scrubs a man to remove dead skin, at the Ghebleh public bathhouse, in Tehran, Iran. The steamy air and curved tiled walls of Iran's famed public bathhouses, some rinsing and massaging patrons for hundreds of years, slowly may wash away as interest in them wanes. The bathhouses, known as “hammams” in Persian, find themselves in rough financial times as modern conveniences now allow showers and baths in most homes across the Islamic Republic. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

A policer officer hits a man with a baton as he tries to maintain order while migrants wait for trains at a temporary camp near Gevgelija, Macedonia, September 7, 2015. Several thousand migrants in Macedonia boarded trains on Sunday to travel north after spending a night in a provisional camp. Macedonia has organised trains twice a day to the north border where migrants cross into Serbia to make their way to Hungary. Since June, Macedonian authorities have said that more than 60,000 migrants have entered the country, and around 1,500 entered just in one day, mainly refugees from Syria. (Photo by Stoyan Nenov/Reuters)