The largest excavated underground city in the world, Elengubu

The largest excavated underground city in the world, Elengubu

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The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth's surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece. Not only do its cave-like rooms stretch on for hundreds of miles, but it's thought the more than 200 small, separate underground cities that have also been discovered in the region may be connected to these tunnels, creating a massive subterranean network.

Derinkuyu was only "rediscovered" in 1963 by an anonymous local who kept losing his chickens. While he was renovating his home, the poultry would disappear into a small crevasse created during the remodel, never to be seen again. Upon closer investigation and some digging, the Turk unearthed a dark passageway. It was the first of more than 600 entrances found within private homes leading to the subterrestrial city of Derinkuyu.

Excavation began immediately, revealing a tangled network of underground dwellings, dry food storage, cattle stables, schools, wineries and even a chapel. It was an entire civilisation tucked safely underground. The cave city was soon spelunked by thousands of Türkiye's least claustrophobic tourists and, in 1985, the region was added to the Unesco World Heritage list.
The city's exact date of construction remains contested, but Anabasis, written by Xenophon of Athens circa 370 BCE, is the oldest written work that seems to reference Derinkuyu. In the book, he mentions Anatolian people, in or near the region of Cappadocia, living underground in excavated homes rather than the more popular cliffside cave-dwellings that are well known in the area.

According to Andrea De Giorgi, associate professor of classical studies at Florida State University, Cappadocia is uniquely suited to this kind of underground construction due to the lack of water in the soil and its malleable, easily mouldable rock. "The geomorphology of the region is conducive to the digging of underground spaces," he said, explaining that the local tuff rock would have been fairly easy to carve with simple tools like shovels and pickaxes. This same pyroclastic material was naturally forged into the fairy-tale chimneys and phallic spires jutting from the earth above ground.
But whom to credit with Derinkuyu's creation remains a partial mystery. The groundwork for the sprawling network of subterranean caves is often attributed to the Hittites, "who may have excavated the first few levels in the rock when they came under attack from the Phrygians around 1200 BCE", according to A Bertini, an expert in Mediterranean cave dwellings, in his essay on regional cave architecture. Adding weight to this hypothesis, Hittite artefacts were found inside Derinkuyu.

However, the bulk of the city was likely built by the Phrygians, highly skilled Iron-age architects who had the means to construct elaborate underground facilities. "The Phrygians were one of Anatolia's most prominent early empires," explained De Giorgi. "They developed across western Anatolia around the end of the first millennium BCE and had a bent for monumentalising rock formations and creating remarkable rock-cut facades. Though elusive, their kingdom spread to include most of western and central Anatolia, including the area of Derinkuyu

Originally, Derinkuyu was likely used for the storage of goods, but its primary purpose was as a temporary haven from foreign invaders, with Cappadocia seeing a constant flux of dominant empires throughout the centuries. "The succession of empires and their impact on the landscapes of Anatolia explain the recourse to underground shelters like Derinkuyu," De Giorgi explained. "It was at the time of the [7th-Century] Islamic raids [on the predominantly Christian Byzantine Empire], however, that these dwellings were used to the fullest." While the Phrygians, Persians and Seljuks, among others, all inhabited the region and expanded upon the underground city in subsequent centuries, Derinkuyu's population swelled to its peak during the Byzantine Era, with nearly 20,000 residents living underground.


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