Beneath a quiet town in central Turkey lies a warren of tunnels, chambers and stairways carved straight down into the rock, deep enough to shelter a small town’s worth of people. It has wells and ventilation shafts, stables and storerooms, kitchens and chapels, all hollowed from soft volcanic stone and connected by passages narrow enough to defend against an intruder. For all its scale, the people who dug it left behind almost nothing to explain themselves.
The complex is one of the largest excavated underground settlements ever found, and it is far from the only one in the region. What sets it apart is the combination of size and secrecy: it could hold thousands of refugees for extended stretches, yet the historical trail behind its earliest construction runs cold. The result is a monument that is astonishing to walk through and maddening to date.
A city carved straight down
The site descends through many levels, reaching a depth on the order of 85 meters, with historical descriptions counting roughly eighteen stories of galleries stacked below the surface. According to detailed accounts of the underground city, it was large enough to accommodate as many as 20,000 people at once, together with their livestock and enough food stores to outlast a siege. Wine and oil presses, cellars, refectories and chapels were all cut into the rock, turning the complex into a self-contained community rather than a simple bolt-hole.
The engineering that made long stays survivable is as impressive as the scale. A network of ventilation shafts drew fresh air deep underground, wells provided water without exposing anyone to the surface, and heavy circular stone doors could be rolled across passageways from the inside, sealing each level off independently. An attacker who breached one floor would find the next one closed against them.
Why the rock made it possible
None of it would exist without the peculiar geology of the surrounding landscape. The region sits on thick layers of volcanic tuff, a soft stone that can be dug with hand tools yet hardens on exposure to air, which is the same material that produced the area’s famous fairy-chimney rock formations. As reference accounts of the region describe, that combination of workability and durability allowed generations of inhabitants to excavate not just cellars but entire subterranean complexes and rock-cut churches across the countryside.
The underground city is one of dozens of such refuges honeycombing the area, linked in some cases by miles of tunnel to neighboring complexes. The soft stone meant that expanding the network was always an option: later occupants could deepen a shaft, open a new chamber, or connect an existing passage without specialized equipment, which is part of why the sites grew so large over time.
Builders lost to time
The oldest phases are the hardest to pin down. Archaeological estimates generally credit the earliest carving to Anatolian peoples such as the Phrygians, and possibly the Hittites before them, working the rock centuries before the common era. But those early builders left no inscriptions, no archives and few artifacts that survive in context, so the initial construction is dated by inference rather than by any written record, as surveys of the site note.
What is clearer is how the city was used later. During the Byzantine era it became a refuge for Christian communities sheltering from raids and persecution, particularly during the long conflict between the Byzantine Empire and Arab forces, and it was enlarged and adapted for that purpose. The chapels and larger communal spaces reflect that phase, layered on top of the older excavations without erasing them.
Rediscovered by accident
For long stretches of modern history the complex was simply forgotten, sealed and unknown beneath ordinary houses. Its rediscovery is often traced to 1963, when a resident knocking through a wall in his home broke into a hidden passage and exposed the network below, a story recounted in accounts of the site’s modern rediscovery. It was partially opened to visitors later that decade, and only a portion of the full extent is accessible today.
That accidental unveiling captures the enduring paradox of the place. A settlement built to keep thousands of people hidden succeeded so completely that it vanished from memory, and even now the fraction open to the public represents only part of what was carved. The silence of its earliest builders leaves the central questions, who first dug it and exactly when, still open, ensuring that the city remains as much a puzzle as a destination.
Life below the surface
The layout reflects the practical demands of hiding large numbers of people for days or weeks at a time. Upper levels, closer to the surface and easier to ventilate, appear to have held living quarters and stables for animals, while deeper floors were given over to storage, communal halls and religious spaces, keeping the most vulnerable functions farthest from any breach. Narrow, low passages forced anyone moving between levels to stoop and go single file, a design that turned the architecture itself into a defense.
The complex did not stand alone. Tunnels are thought to have connected it to other underground settlements in the surrounding region, allowing populations to move between refuges or escape if one was compromised. That network of linked shelters, carved across generations, points to a landscape where the threat of raids was a recurring fact of life. Only a portion of the excavated levels is open to visitors today, and the site now functions as one of the region’s best-known attractions, giving modern travelers a glimpse of a survival strategy that once played out entirely out of sight.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by Morning Overview editors.
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