By Keira Lu
While this might sound like something straight out of a fantasy novel, it’s true. There once existed a city built entirely underground, with all the accommodations of a small town, and areas for food storage and livestock! This surreal-sounding city is Derinkuyu, in the Kapadokya region of present-day Türkiye.
Derinkuyu started as a collection of caverns chiseled into the soft volcanic bedrock of Kapadokya. During the Roman Empire, it was expanded into a complex network of chambers and tunnels. Its likely first purpose was a place to store grain, but it was quickly transformed into a shelter from foreign invaders. After the fall of the Roman Empire, during the Byzantine Era, Derikuyu was fully carved out, becoming a small underground town, and its frequent use during that time is evidenced by several Byzantine artifacts found in the caves. People may have lived in it to protect themselves from the frequent Christian-Muslim wars of that era. The city was used by local Christian refugees as a shelter during the invasion of the Turco-Mongolian ruler Timur, who persecuted Christians all through Türkiye. Once the Ottoman Empire took control, the Christians of that time often hid in the caves from the Turkish rulers. Derinkuyu was also used extensively during the late 1800s early 1900s, as Christian, Armenian and Greek persecutions arose again. In April of 1909, fearing an Armenian rebellion, armed Muslim Turks in the town of Adana attacked the Armenian parts of the town, burning over 4,000 homes and killing over 2,000 people. When the surrounding towns heard of this, many Christians, Armenians and Greeks sought refuge in the caves, remaining there for many days until the smoke had cleared.
You may be wondering, how did several hundred people survive purely underground for at least a week? Turns out, Derinkuyu is somewhat ingeniously built, with enough room to house up to 20,000 people and all the facilities that a proper town needs to function. The city has 18 levels of chambers and hallways, reaching 85 feet belowground. Tunnels and stairs connected the floors, and the tunnels could be closed off from within by giant rolling stones that served as doors. If the city was invaded, the inhabitants could gather themselves on the lower levels, seal off the tunnels with the invaders, and escape through other tunnels. 50 huge ventilation shafts connected all layers of the city to the surface of the earth, letting the inhabitants have fresh air. A carefully designed web of smaller tunnels branch off from the 50 main shafts, providing oxygen to almost every room. Besides living quarters, Derinkuyu included cellars for storing grain, stables for housing animals, communal kitchens and dining rooms, oil and wine presses, and even churches and schools. Some shafts served as chimneys to let out the smoke from cooking fires. Several shafts also reached freshwater aquifers below the city, so both the people in the caves and the people in the surface villages nearby could draw up water to drink. Over 600 entrances were cleverly hidden in the villages above (one town is also called Derinkuyu), many in people’s homes, yards or wells.
This leads to an interesting story about how Derinkuyu was rediscovered. In 1963, a local Turkish man decided to renovate his basement. When a wall in his basement collapsed, revealing a hidden room that turned out to be the mouth of a long tunnel. Archeological exploration revealed that the tunnel led straight to the underground Derinkuyu. As of today, only a small fraction of Derinkuyu is explored, and 2% of it is open to the public
You may be wondering why Derinkuyu was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1960s when it was in use only 50 or so years ago. The answer to that is, the majority of the people who used Derinkuyu were Christians, Greeks and Armenians. In 1923, the governments of Greece and Türkiye signed the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Turkish and Greek Populations, agreeing to ‘exchange’ the “Greeks” in Asia Minor with the “Turks” in Greece. Basically, all Christians, regardless of ethnicity, who lived within the Ottoman Empire were forced to move to Greece, and all Muslims, again regardless of ethnicity, who lived in Greece were forced to move into the Ottoman Empire. So all the minorities who used Derinkuyu as a refuge were moved out of Tǘrkiye, and the locals who were left had no knowledge of the place. Derinkuyu was practically abandoned, reduced to a folktale.
But now that the city has been found again, who knows what secrets might be unearthed in its labyrinth of tunnels?
