Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu Yeraltı Şehri
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- More than 600 separate entrances to the underground city have been found since 1963, some of them hidden beneath the basements of houses in the town above.
- Each level could be sealed off on its own, so defenders could cut off a breached section, move people internally and even mount counterattacks.
- The main air shaft, about 3 by 2.8 metres, was laid out so that the openings on different levels never sit directly above one another, apparently to improve airflow.
- The Turkish name Derinkuyu means "deep well", after the shafts that once supplied water both to the hidden city and to the town on the surface.
- Cappadocian Greeks called the place Malakopia, a name probably linked to the Greek word for "soft", a nod to the easily carved volcanic tuff.
- It is the largest underground city excavated in Turkey, one of dozens of such subterranean complexes scattered across Cappadocia.
- A spacious barrel-vaulted room on the second level, found in no other Cappadocian underground city, is reported to have served as a religious school with studies beside it.
- The city was greatly enlarged between roughly 780 and 1180, when it sheltered local Christians from Umayyad and later Abbasid raiding armies.
- The Cambridge linguist Richard Dawkins recorded that in 1909, after news of the Adana massacres, villagers of a nearby Greek-speaking village spent several nights hiding in underground chambers.
Why it is worth it
Derinkuyu is the deepest of the underground cities of Cappadocia, a warren of rooms, stairways and passages cut down through the soft volcanic tuff to a depth of around 85 metres. From the surface there is almost nothing to see; below, the city opens out level after level, with stables and cellars near the top, then kitchens with clay tandoor ovens, refectories, wine and oil presses, storerooms, wells, rooms that may have served for teaching, and on the lowest level a church. At its largest it could shelter as many as twenty thousand people together with their animals and provisions.
What makes Derinkuyu extraordinary is how completely it was engineered for survival. A system of vertical shafts carried fresh air down through every level, one of them a central well more than fifty metres deep that supplied water both to the hidden rooms and to the village above. Narrow corridors force visitors to stoop in single file, and at key points heavy round stone doors, set in grooves, could be rolled across the passage from the inside and could not be moved from the outside. A tunnel several kilometres long is believed to have linked the city to its neighbour at Kaymaklı.
The first chambers may go back to the Phrygians in the eighth or seventh century BC, but the city grew to its full size in Byzantine times, when the Arab–Byzantine wars made the Anatolian plateau a frontier and whole communities retreated underground during raids. The Greek-speaking Christians of Cappadocia still used it as a refuge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the population exchange of 1923 emptied the region. It was then forgotten, and rediscovered in 1963 when a resident renovating his house broke through a wall and found a passage behind it. Derinkuyu is part of the Göreme National Park and Rock Sites of Cappadocia, a World Heritage Site since 1985.
Getting there
The underground city is in the middle of the town of Derinkuyu, about 29 km south of Nevşehir, the provincial capital. Nevşehir Kapadokya Airport (NAV) is about 48 km away. Most visitors come by car or on day tours from Göreme and the villages of central Cappadocia, often combining Derinkuyu with the neighbouring underground city of Kaymaklı. The passages are narrow and low, and the lower levels can feel cramped.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Derinkuyu, also known as Malakopi, is an ancient multi-level underground city near the modern town of Derinkuyu in Nevşehir Province, Turkey, extending to a depth of approximately 85 metres (280 ft). It is large enough to have sheltered as many as 20,000 people together with their livestock and food stores. It is the largest excavated underground city in Turkey and is one of several underground complexes found throughout Cappadocia.
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