{"it":{"id":"LEV-001","kind":"site","sub":"Levant and Anatolia","name":"Derinkuyu underground city","place":"Turkey","lat":38.373,"lon":34.735,"date":"History Tunnels and rooms might initially have been cut into the soft volcanic rock of…","mat":"tuff","nfacts":12,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"Derinkuyu reaches an estimated 85 m below Cappadocia in central Türkiye and is estimated to have sheltered up to 20,000 people with their livestock and food (single source). Its levels can be sealed from the inside by huge rolling stone doors.","why":"It is the largest excavated underground city in Türkiye. When the first chambers were cut is uncertain, with estimates running back to the 1st millennium BCE.","src":[306,612],"nsrc":3,"yt":"Derinkuyu could be sealed from inside with rolling stone doors. Who were its builders hiding from?","rel":["GOB-TEP"],"hook":"A house wall knocked through in 1963 opened onto a city 85 m deep. Who dug it first is still unknown."},"S":{"306":["Wikipedia: Derinkuyu underground city","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city"],"612":["UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia (includes Derinkuyu)","https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357"]},"rec":{"id":"LEV-001","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"Province Turkey extending to a depth of approximately","a":"depth","v":"85","u":"m","o":"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 m.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381546968 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1574"},{"f":"A","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"55","u":"m","o":"A 55 m shaft appears to have been used as a well, providing water to both the villagers above and, if the outside world was not accessible, to those in hiding.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381546968 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1575"},{"f":"REF9 The main central shaft which measures roughly","a":"plan dimension (pair)","v":"3","u":"m","o":"REF8 REF9 The main central shaft which measures roughly 3 m by 2.8 m and connects to several levels, never has the openings of two different levels overlapping one another, in a layout that appears deliberately engineered to maximise airflow.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381546968 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1576"},{"f":"central shaft which measures roughly 3 m by","a":"plan dimension (pair)","v":"2.8","u":"m","o":"REF8 REF9 The main central shaft which measures roughly 3 m by 2.8 m and connects to several levels, never has the openings of two different levels overlapping one another, in a layout that appears deliberately engineered to maximise airflow.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1381546968 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1577"},{"f":"city","a":"depth","v":"~85","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3356"},{"f":"city","a":"capacity","v":"up to 20,000 people","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3357"},{"f":"well shaft","a":"depth","v":"55","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3358"},{"f":"central shaft","a":"section","v":"~3 x 2.8","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3359"},{"f":"city","a":"entrances","v":">600","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3360"},{"f":"city","a":"rediscovery","v":"1963","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3361"},{"f":"tunnel to Kaymakli","a":"length","v":"8-9","u":"km","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3362"},{"f":"city","a":"origin","v":"Phrygian 8th-7th c BCE; Byzantine enlargement 780-1180","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Derinkuyu","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3363"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"REF1 It was known to Cappadocian Greek speakers as Malakopia () (also recorded in Turkish as Melagobia or Melegobi), a name plausibly related to Greek (malakos, \"soft\"), in reference to the easily worked local tuff.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA021","a":"too deep/complex for its builders","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"soft tuff excavated over centuries","ms":"","st":"unresolved","n":"","nl":4}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"History Tunnels and rooms might initially have been cut into the soft volcanic rock of the Cappadocia region by the Phrygians, in the 8th-7th century BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"38.3735","lon":"34.7351","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/281777097"},"src":[{"id":"S2613","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia (includes Derinkuyu)","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357"},{"id":"VLEV-001-4","t":"Kapadokya Geopark: Derinkuyu underground city","u":"https://www.kapadokyajeopark.com.tr/en/Geopark/derinkuyu-yeralti-sehri_81"},{"id":"VLEV-001-5","t":"BBC Travel: Turkey's underground city of 20,000 people","u":"https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkeys-underground-city-of-20000-people"},{"id":"S0289","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derinkuyu_underground_city&oldid=1381546968"},{"id":"S0470","t":"Wikipedia: Derinkuyu underground city","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city"},{"id":null,"t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia” (List no. 357).","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357/"},{"id":null,"t":"Dawkins, R.M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A Study of the Dialects of Silli, Cappadocia and Phárasa. Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–16, 24 (field visits 1909–1911). Public-domain scan, Internet Archive.","u":"https://archive.org/details/moderngreekinas00hallgoog"},{"id":null,"t":"Yamaç, A. & Tok, E. 2015. Surveying some of the touristic underground cities of Cappadocia (Turkey). Hypogea 2015, Proceedings of the International Congress of Speleology in Artificial Cavities, Rome.","u":"https://www.operaipogea.it/wp-content/uploads/1995/03/13-Yamac-Tok-touristic-Cappadocia.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Nas, S. & Aytıs, S. 2026. Typological classification and AI-assisted spatial representation in underground architecture: the case of Derinkuyu Underground City. IJSHS 10(1): 119–148.","u":"https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/ijshs/article/1996371"},{"id":null,"t":"Oktar, O. 2023. Derinkuyu Yeraltı Şehrinin Sabit Saçıcılı İnterferometri Tekniği ile İncelenmesi. AKÜ FEMÜBİD 23: 1206–1213. doi:10.35414/akufemubid.1211892.","u":"https://doi.org/10.35414/akufemubid.1211892"},{"id":null,"t":"Xenophon, Anabasis, Book IV, trans. H. G. Dakyns. Project Gutenberg eBook #1170.","u":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1170"},{"id":null,"t":"Vendidad, Fargard 2, trans. J. Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East vol. 4 (1880), via avesta.org.","u":"https://www.avesta.org/vendidad/vd2sbe.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Daines, M. 2025. The Labyrinth and the Travelling Bag: Part 4 of Images from Göbekli Tepe and Other Neolithic Sites. Graham Hancock official website, 19 June 2025.","u":"https://grahamhancock.com/dainesm16/"}],"sum":"Early in the twentieth century, in a Cappadocian village then called Malakopi, the water lay 70 to 80 metres down. The Cambridge linguist Richard MacGillivray Dawkins, who visited between 1909 and 1911, watched how it was brought up: big windlasses turned by several women at once, walking round and round like sailors at a capstan. He noted something else about the village. Its underground galleries were already \"famous for their great depth.\" The women were drawing water from above a city.\n\nThe village is now the town of Derinkuyu, in Nevşehir Province in central Türkiye, and its name means \"deep well.\" The Cappadocian Greek speakers who lived there knew it as Malakopia, a name probably related to the Greek word for \"soft,\" after the easily worked stone beneath their feet. Both names point at the same secret. Under the streets lies the largest excavated underground city in the country, reaching an estimated 85 metres down, about the height of a 25-storey building turned upside down.\n\nThe rock made it possible. Derinkuyu is carved mostly into tuff, compacted volcanic ash laid across this region by ancient eruptions. UNESCO describes the Göreme area as bounded by ranges of extinct volcanoes, with Erciyes Dağ at one end and Hasan Dağ at the other, and since 1985 Göreme National Park and the rock sites of Cappadocia have been on the World Heritage List, their protected area taking in two underground towns, five troglodyte villages and more than 200 rock-hewn churches. It is soft enough that a people with patience could dig into it almost indefinitely.\n\nThey did not dig a hole. They dug a town. Derinkuyu has wine and oil presses, stables, cellars, storerooms, refectories and chapels. Its kitchens held tandoor ovens of the kind still used in Cappadocian villages. A spacious barrel-vaulted room on the second floor is reported to have been a religious school, and staircases lead down to a cross-shaped church at the bottom. More than 600 entrances have been found, some hidden under the basements of private houses in the town above. A tunnel of 8 to 9 kilometres is said to link it with its neighbour, the underground city of Kaymaklı.\n\nThe hardest problem underground is air, and here it was solved with real skill. Vertical shafts branch into smaller vents that reach living quarters and individual rooms. In the main central shaft, about 3 metres by 2.8, the openings at different levels never line up, a layout that appears designed to keep the air moving. A 55-metre shaft seems to have served as a well for villagers above and refugees below at once.\n\nHow big is it, really? The question is harder than it sounds. Most writers give eight storeys, and a 2023 satellite study uses the same figure, but a 2026 architectural study found the floor boundaries indistinct and the rooms stacked irregularly, and chose instead to sort the spaces by use. That study puts the church on the seventh level down, at about 159 cubic metres. Older accounts place it on the fifth. Cavers from Istanbul's OBRUK group, who surveyed the city with 1,880 metres of measurements from 489 survey stations, mapped about 3,786 square metres and ended up drawing it as five separate plans, because it would not fit on one. The famous capacity of 20,000 people with their livestock and food is a single estimate that no one has tested. Even the date it opened to visitors varies by source, 1967 or 1969.\n\nWhat everyone agrees on is what it was for. Every design choice serves concealment and defence. Great stone discs sit in recesses beside narrow passages, ready to be rolled across from inside, and each floor can be sealed off separately. Dawkins described them and admitted, \"How it could be opened again without great difficulty is not so clear.\" One gallery at Malakopi had five such doors in a row. In the nearby village of Aravan, a local man told him that people hiding inside had fired guns through the hole at the centre of the disc. The design allowed a population to vanish, to isolate sections that were breached, and even to strike back.\n\nThis is where a student of strategy would linger. A city like this is the architecture of fear, and of a particular strategy: when you cannot win in the open, deny your enemy a target. Its great age of use came during the Arab-Byzantine wars, from about 780 to 1180, when local Christians sheltered from Umayyad and later Abbasid armies. They went down again before the Seljuk invasions of the eleventh century and the raids of Timur in the fourteenth. Under the Ottomans the refuges kept their Cappadocian Greek name, katafygia. In peaceful times people came up and built above ground; when danger returned, they went back down. Dawkins recorded that in 1909, after massacres at Adana, much of the population of the village of Axo \"took refuge in these underground chambers, and for some nights did not venture to sleep above ground.\"\n\nThen, in 1923, the Christian inhabitants were sent to Greece in the population exchange, and the city was abandoned. Forty years later almost no one remembered it. In 1963 a man renovating his house knocked through a basement wall, found a room nobody knew existed, and behind it the way into the tunnels.\n\nThe mainstream account is a story of growth. Tunnels and rooms may first have been cut by the Phrygians in the eighth or seventh century BC, according to Türkiye's Ministry of Culture. In the Christian period of the Late Roman Empire they were expanded into deep, multi-level structures with chapels and Greek inscriptions, and the city was fully formed in Byzantine times. Underground living in the wider region is old enough to have impressed the Greek soldier Xenophon, who described villages in Armenia where \"the houses were underground structures with an aperture like the mouth of a well by which to enter,\" with goats, sheep and cattle reared below.\n\nThe difficulty is that the beginning is a guess. The Phrygian origin is offered only as a possibility. No inscription, tool-mark study or dated layer in the record shows when the first chamber at Derinkuyu was cut. UNESCO traces the region's underground towns to a habitat going back to the fourth century AD. The OBRUK cavers, who count more than 200 underground cities identified in Cappadocia, only 12 of them mapped, tie them to defence \"probably\" between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Those are dates of use. They are not dates of origin.\n\nInto that gap step older questions. The writer Madeleine Daines, on Graham Hancock's website, asks: \"Did someone in a long distant past prepare a massive underground refuge in which to house many thousands of people,\" and sets the question against a region that \"lived under the threat of a re-awakening of the Hellenic volcanic arc.\" A Zoroastrian scripture, the Vendidad, has its god warn the hero Yima that \"the evil winters are about to fall, that shall bring the fierce, deadly frost,\" and tells him to \"make thee a Vara,\" an enclosure \"to be an abode for man,\" with streets, seeds of animals and people, \"a door, and a window self-shining within.\" No source ties that text to this site. But a sealed refuge, built for survival, with its own air and water and herds, is exactly what lies under Derinkuyu.\n\nNobody knows how many rooms are still sealed beneath the houses that have never been renovated. Picture one of the great stone doors rolled across its passage from the inside and never rolled back, the hole at its centre dark, and on the far side, in air that has not moved for a century, a staircase going down.","qs":["Derinkuyu could be sealed from inside with rolling stone doors. Who were its builders hiding from?","The 20,000 figure rests on one source. How would you estimate how many people a tunnel city could really hold?","If the oldest chambers are Phrygian and the deepest Byzantine, whose city is it?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9910_Nevit.jpg/1280px-Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9910_Nevit.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9910_Nevit.jpg","title":"Derinkuyu Underground City 9910 Nevit.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Nevit Dilmen (talk)","cap":"Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia, Turkey. Christians fled the enemies and hid in this underground cities."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Aziz_Theodoros_Trion_Kilisesi_Derinkuyu_-_Aussenansicht_2026_%28cropped%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aziz_Theodoros_Trion_Kilisesi_Derinkuyu_-_Aussenansicht_2026_(cropped).jpg","title":"Aziz Theodoros Trion Kilisesi Derinkuyu - Aussenansicht 2026 (cropped).jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"MuratGemici50","cap":"Derinkuyu'daki Aziz Theodoros Trion Kilisesi'nin (Üzümlü Kilise) dış görünümü, çan kulesiyle birlikte. 1858'de inşa edilen Rum Ortodoks kilisesi."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Derinkuyu-05-astique.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu-05-astique.jpg","title":"Derinkuyu-05-astique.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Elena Pleskevich from Moscow, Russia","cap":"Cappadocia / Derinkuyu"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9831_Nevit_Enhancer.jpg/1280px-Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9831_Nevit_Enhancer.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9831_Nevit_Enhancer.jpg","title":"Derinkuyu Underground City 9831 Nevit Enhancer.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Nevit Dilmen (talk)","cap":"Ventilation well in Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia, Turkey. Christians fled the enemies and hid in this underground cities. All digging starts with a ","alt":"Ventilation well in Derinkuyu Underground City in Cappadocia, Turkey. Christians fled the enemies and hid in this underground cities. All digging starts with a"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/Derinkuyu_Underground_City_T%C3%BCrkiye.jpg/1280px-Derinkuyu_Underground_City_T%C3%BCrkiye.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu_Underground_City_T%C3%BCrkiye.jpg","title":"Derinkuyu Underground City Türkiye.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Joe Wallace","cap":"A Multi-level ancient city, thought to have sheltered 20,000 people, livestock and food. Building was thought to have started around 750BC and fully formed by t"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Tuff","h":"Made of","s":[59]}],"hs":{"59":["Wikipedia: Derinkuyu underground city (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/LEV-001.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9910_Nevit.jpg/1280px-Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9910_Nevit.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}