Derinkuyu: The Underground City Hidden Beneath a Turkish Town

In 1963, in the small town of Derinkuyu in central Turkey, a man was renovating his house. Like many homes in the area, it had rooms cut back into the soft rock. When he broke through one of the walls, he found an opening, and beyond it a passage leading down into the dark.

It led into one of the largest underground cities ever found.

The chickens, and the wall

The story most people know is more charming. In the popular version, the man's chickens kept slipping through a small hole in the wall of his basement and never coming back. Curious, he knocked down the wall to see where they were going and found a tunnel.

It is a lovely detail, and it is repeated by guides and travel writers everywhere. But it is hard to verify, and accounts vary. What is documented is the essential part: in 1963, a resident of Derinkuyu discovered a passage behind a wall of his house, and it opened into a network of rooms, corridors and stairways going down many levels.

A landscape made for digging

To understand Derinkuyu, you have to understand the ground it is carved into. Millions of years ago, volcanoes in central Anatolia buried the region under thick layers of ash, which hardened into a soft rock called tuff. Wind and water have since carved it into the famous fairy chimneys of Cappadocia.

Tuff has an unusual property. It is soft enough to carve with simple hand tools, but it hardens after it is exposed to air. Over thousands of years, people in Cappadocia carved houses, churches, dovecotes, storerooms and stables into it. Underground, the rock also keeps a steady temperature all year round, which made it ideal for storing food.

How deep does it go?

Derinkuyu is the deepest of the underground cities in Cappadocia that are open to visitors. The most widely cited depth is about 85 metres. Visitors can explore about eight levels, connected by sloping passages and steep, narrow stairways, but estimates of the full number of levels vary, and some sources give much higher figures. Large parts are closed to the public, and some may never have been fully explored.

The scale is what astonishes people. Estimates suggest the city could have sheltered up to 20,000 people, along with their animals and food. That number is an estimate based on its size, not a historical record, but even a fraction of it would have been a remarkable community living entirely underground.

Life below the surface

The upper levels held stables for animals, along with rooms that appear to have been used for pressing grapes into wine and storing food. These levels were the easiest to reach and are where the most day-to-day work would have happened.

Deeper down are rooms archaeologists interpret as living quarters, communal kitchens blackened by smoke, storage areas and wells. On the second level is a large room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, often described as a school or meeting hall. On the lower levels is a cross-shaped chamber thought to have been used as a church.

Fresh air was the critical problem, and the builders solved it. Dozens of vertical shafts run down through the city, drawing air into the lower levels. Some shafts reached groundwater and served as wells, so that the people below had water without having to go outside.

Doors of stone

Derinkuyu was not built for comfort. It was built for safety. The passages between levels are often narrow and low, forcing anyone coming through to stoop and move in single file, which made them easy to defend.

At key points, the passages could be sealed with huge rolling stone doors. These round slabs of rock, roughly a metre or more across and weighing several hundred kilograms, sit in grooves cut into the side of the passage. People inside could roll them across the opening, leaving attackers on the other side with no handle and no way to push them back. Each level could be sealed off separately.

Who built it, and why?

No one built Derinkuyu all at once. The first chambers may be very old. The Greek writer Xenophon, describing his journey through Anatolia around 400 BC, mentioned villages where people and animals lived together in houses dug underground. The Phrygians, who ruled much of Anatolia in the early first millennium BC, are sometimes credited with the first underground spaces in the region, but the evidence is thin.

What is clear is that the city grew enormously during the Byzantine era. Between the 7th and 10th centuries AD, Cappadocia lay on the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the Arab caliphates, and raids were frequent. Christian communities enlarged and connected their cellars into refuges where whole villages could hide, with their livestock and food, until danger passed.

The underground spaces stayed in use for centuries. The town above was known in Greek as Malakopi, and its Greek-speaking Christian inhabitants are said to have used the tunnels as a refuge from danger as late as the early 20th century.

Forgotten, then found

In 1923, after the Greco-Turkish War, Greece and Turkey agreed a compulsory exchange of populations. The Cappadocian Greeks of Derinkuyu left for Greece, and with them went much of the living memory of the city below.

The underground spaces were never entirely forgotten. Local people kept using some of the upper rooms as cellars and stables. But how far the passages extended, and how deep they went, was lost. When the resident broke through his wall in 1963, it was only a few decades after the city's last users had left. Few of the people living above it knew how enormous it really was.

Visiting Derinkuyu today

After the rediscovery, the passages were cleared and lit, and Derinkuyu opened to visitors in 1969. It is now one of the most visited sites in Cappadocia, part of the area inscribed by UNESCO in 1985 as Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia. Several kilometres away is Kaymaklı, another underground city, and a long tunnel is said to connect the two.

Derinkuyu is not unique. Cappadocia contains well over a hundred underground settlements of different sizes, and new ones are still being found. In 2014, work on an urban renewal project in the provincial capital, Nevşehir, revealed another large underground city beneath its old castle district.

Walking through Derinkuyu today means stooping through low tunnels, climbing narrow stairways and passing rolling stone doors that were last used in earnest centuries ago. It is a reminder that whole communities once lived, worked and prayed beneath ordinary streets, and that the town above was only half of the town.