We live cheek by jowl with undiscovered worlds. Sometimes the barriers that separate us are thick, sometimes they’re thin, and sometimes they’re breached. That’s when a wardrobe turns into a portal to Narnia, a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland, and a Raquel Welch poster is all that separates a prison cell from the tunnel to freedom.
A Fateful Swing of the Hammer
Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
The anonymous Turk—no report mentions his name—had found a vast subterranean city, up to 18 stories and 280 feet (76 meters) deep and large enough to house 20,000 people. Who built it, and why? When was it abandoned, and by whom? History and geology provide some answers.
A hot air balloon with the Turkish flag sails past fairy chimneys, a rock formation typical for Cappadocia. Murat Asil / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
Fantastically Craggy Cappadocia
Geology first. Derinkuyu is located in Cappadocia, a region in the Turkish heartland famed for the fantastic cragginess of its landscape, which is dotted with so-called fairy chimneys. Those tall stone towers are the result of the erosion of a rock type known as tuff. Created out of volcanic ash and covering much of the region, that stone, despite its name, is not so tough.
Taking a cue from the wind and rain, the locals for millennia have dug their own holes in the soft stone for underground dwellings, storage rooms, temples, and refuges. Cappadocia numbers hundreds of subterranean dwellings, with about 40 consisting of at least two levels. None is as large, or by now as famous, as Derinkuyu.
Hittites, Phrygians, or Early Christians?
The historical record has little definitive to say about Derinkuyu’s origins. Some archaeologists speculate that the oldest part of the complex could have been dug about 2000 B.C. by the Hittites, the people who dominated the region at that time, or else the Phrygians, around 700 B.C. Others claim that local Christians built the city in the first centuries A.D.
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