Radical-Thoughts

Why Is There a Massive Ancient City Hidden Beneath Turkey? In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing it, he had uncovered the entrance to Derinkuyu: an underground city capable of housing up to 20,000 people beneath Cappadocia. What appeared was “a stone iceberg.” That’s how Roberto Bixio, founder of the Genoa-based Centro Studi Sotterranei, describes the largest underground city of the ancient world. “The part that extends below ground level is, on average, between six and 10 times deeper than the height of the above-ground buildings of ancient Malakopea [in the same area]," he explains. Today, this site is known in Turkish as Derinkuyu, meaning "deep well." The name is no exaggeration. Derinkuyu’s origins may date back to around the eighth century B.C., with successive civilizations expanding it through at least the Byzantine era. The result is a vast underground complex with rooms, stables, cellars, tombs, schools and even churches with refectories. It descends to a depth of about 280 feet and is organized on at least 18 levels. Some of these spaces continued to be used until the 19th century before Derinkuyu fell into oblivion. Why Was Derinkuyu Built? Peace was not the norm in this part of the world. What is now central Turkey was the center of the Hittite Empire and, later, part of the Phrygian, Assyrian and Persian empires. It was then conquered by Alexander the Great and became an important Roman and Byzantine province. Between the seventh and 10th centuries A.D., it suffered Arab incursions and by 1175 it had fallen to the Seljuk Turks. Finally, it was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire from the second half of the 15th century onward. The choice to build Derinkuyu was strategic but also geological. In need of defense, inhabitants of this area discovered that the rock there could be easily excavated and carved. The volcanic tuff that dominates Cappadocia—a porous rock formed from ash—is soft enough to be worked with relative ease but stable enough to support large underground cavities without the need for additional reinforcement. In Greek, malakos means “soft,” so Malakopea is likely a reference to the nature of the local stone.  More than 360 ancient underground settlements have been geolocated in Cappadocia, spread across a vast area of volcanic tuff covering more than 7,700 square miles, at an average altitude of 3,300 and 4,900 feet above sea level. Derinkuyu, located in the province of Nevşehir, stands out as an exceptional case. At about 4,480 feet above sea level, it descends into volcanic formations beneath the town’s terrain. Per María de los Ángeles Orfila