Derinkuyu underground city

Derinkuyu underground city

Derinkuyu (Turkish pronunciation: [deˈɾinkuju]), 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.

Etymology

Derinkuyu underground city

Remaining Cappadocian Greek-speaking villages before 1924 deportations.

The name Derinkuyu means "deep well", after the deep shafts that once supplied the settlement and the town above it with water. It was known to Cappadocian Greek speakers as Malakopia (Μαλακοπέα) (also recorded in Turkish as Melagobia or Melegobi), a name plausibly related to Greek μαλακός (malakos, "soft"), in reference to the easily worked local tuff.

Architecture

Derinkuyu underground city

The underground city at Derinkuyu was carved mostly into tuff, a rock formed from compacted volcanic ash which is widespread in the region. It could be closed from the inside with large rolling stone doors. Each floor could be closed off separately. The city could accommodate up to 20,000 people and had amenities found in other underground complexes across Cappadocia, such as wine and oil presses, stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, and chapels. The kitchens were equipped with ovens called "Tandoor", which are still used in the villages of Cappadocia today. Unique to the Derinkuyu complex is a spacious room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling located on the second floor. It has been reported that this room was used as a religious school and the rooms to the left were studies.

Starting between the third and fourth levels are a series of staircases, which led to a church on the lowest (fifth) level.

A deep ventilation well in the city

The complex possesses a large amount of vertical ventilation shafts, divided into the smaller air vents that link living quarters and other individual rooms, to the wider central shafts, of which a 55-metre (180 ft) one 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. 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.

History

Derinkuyu underground city

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. Much later during the Christian period of the Late Roman Empire, the inhabitants expanded their caverns to deep multiple-level structures adding the chapels and Greek inscriptions.

The city at Derinkuyu was fully formed in the Byzantine era. The city was connected with another underground city, Kaymakli, through 8–9 km (5.0–5.6 mi) of tunnels. Inhabitants dug deeper and carved out tunnels, chapels, a school, into what had previously been simpler cave homes. The city was significantly enlarged during the Arab–Byzantine wars from roughly 780 to 1180, when it sheltered the local Christians from Umayyad and later Abbasid raider armies. The site's defensive underground design permitted not only concealment but the isolation of individual sections, internal movement of inhabitants, and even organised counterattacks if part of the city was breached. It was likely during this period that Derinkuyu's population came closest to its peak capacity of around 20,000 people.

The underground cities of Cappadocia continued to be used by Christians for protection from the Seljuk invasions of the area in the 11th century and the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century. The population continued to surface and build above ground during peaceful periods, but returned to the underground cities in times of danger.

In the 20th century, the underground cities were still used by Cappadocian Greeks and Armenians to escape periodic persecutions. Richard MacGillivray Dawkins, a Cambridge linguist who conducted research from 1909 to 1911 on the Cappadocian Greek-speaking population in the area, recorded such an event as having occurred in 1909: "When the news came of the recent massacres at Adana, a great part of the population at Axo took refuge in these underground chambers, and for some nights did not venture to sleep above ground."

After the region fell to the Ottomans, the local Christian population used cities as refuges (Cappadocian Greek: καταφύγια) from the Turkish rulers.

In 1923, the Christian inhabitants of the region were expelled from Turkey and moved to Greece in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, whereupon the underground city was abandoned.

Knowledge of the city faded until 1963, when it was rediscovered after a resident of the area, while renovating his home, knocked through a basement wall and found a mysterious room behind it. Further digging revealed an access to the tunnel network. More than 600 separate tunnel entrances to the complex have since been discovered, some concealed under the basements of private houses in the above town.

Gallery

Derinkuyu underground city

• The room with the barrel-vaulted ceiling, possibly a school • A corridor • A ventilation well • The surface Church above the city