Where is hell located?

 The teaching that hell is in the earth is the teaching of the Orthodox Church. This teaching is found in many writings of the Holy Fathers. None of them reject it. The Divine Revelations given to the saints of God confirm it.

In the early years of Christianity, when the fierce zeal of the pagans to preserve paganism on earth spilled rivers of innocent Christian blood, in Brusa, the chief city of Bithynia, the bishop of the city, Patricius, was tortured and executed.

The torturer-gemon bathed in the hot springs near the city. Here he interrogated and later killed the bishop. The ruler attributed the temperature and healing properties of these springs to the idols he worshipped.

Concerning these hot waters, St. Patrick spoke to him as follows:

Glorious ruler, if you wish to know the truth about the principle, the flow and the warmth of these waters, then I can reveal it to you if you will listen to me with meekness. Whoever confesses holy Christianity and worships the one true God acquires a mind filled with understanding of the Divine mysteries. And I, being a servant of Christ, though a sinner, can explain the truth about these waters. God, foreseeing that the people He created would anger Him... and having rejected the true worship of God, would make for themselves lifeless idols and worship them, He prepared two places for men to pursue their earthly life.

He illuminated the first place with eternal light and filled it with abundant and ineffable blessings; the other place was filled with impenetrable darkness, unquenchable fire, and eternal executions. He decreed that those who would seek to please Him by fulfilling His commandments should settle in the first place, and those who would anger the Creator with their evil lives and deserve to be executed would be cast into the second, dark place.

Those who are honored with the place of light will live an immortal life in uninterrupted and endless joy, and those who are cast into the dark place will be tormented endlessly, endlessly. The Creator, separating fire from water and light from darkness, created each separately and placed them in separate places.

There is fire and water both above the firmament of heaven and below the earth. The water on the surface of the earth, gathered together, is called the sea, and the underground water is called the abyss. From this abyss, to meet the needs of the people and animals that inhabit the earth, the waters rise up through the bowels of the earth as through pipes of water and come out on the surface of the earth to form springs, wells and rivers.

Of these waters, those that approach the underground fire are heated by it and flow out hot; those that flow away from the fire retain their natural coolness. In some parts of the abyss there are the coldest waters, transformed into ice, as if far from the fire.

The underground fire is designed to torment evil souls. The water of the underworld turned to ice is called tartar. In Tartarus, false gods and their worshippers are subjected to endless torture. Tartarus is deeper than all the other abysses that lie underground.

At least let the fire that erupts from the bowels of the earth in Sicily prove to you that there is fire under the earth, prepared for the wicked.

Thus did this holy bishop in the early centuries of the Church of Christ speak of the subterranean hell.

St. John Climacus also mentions the location of hell in the interior of the earth. He advises the ascetic of piety to constantly remember the vast abyss of the flames of the underworld, the terrible subterranean places and the abysses and close congregations, so that by such contemplation and recollection the soul may be detached from the pleasure acquired