A renovation project in Turkey led to the discovery of a lost city (2023)
atlasobscura.com86 points by areoform 2 days ago
86 points by areoform 2 days ago
When I was stationed in Turkey, I went on a trip to see Özkonak, which is a similar underground city. Living in a country where almost nothing man-made is more than a couple hundred years old, it's wild to see a whole underground city made by human hands thousands of years go. And that these were necessary only because semi-regular invasions were basically a fact of life back then.
I'm no historian, but looking at a map, Turkey seems geographically prone to getting trampled over and over.
It's basically the hub that connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia together. If someone builds an empire in any of those areas and tries to expand to another one, they're going to want to control the territory that connects them. Even if they don't want Turkey for its own sake, it's a stepping stone.
In other words, if you want to not get invaded, it really helps to be off in a corner that's not on anybody's way from anything to anything. Turkey is the opposite.
I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety, especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
My father, a Turk, has a couple of close Armenian friends from Arapkir, a county of Malatya, from his childhood right after WWII. Going back 30-40 years before that period, Armenians were the majority ethnic population in many counties of eastern Turkish cities. Not sure about Persians, but having an Armenian connection in a big chunk of your DNA if you're from the area shouldn't be that surprising.
Fun fact. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, has Malatya and Arabkir districts.
edit: typo
> I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety
Historically, being "conquered/trampled" didn't mean genetic displacement or even mixing. Especially if an established and stable population already existed there. It just meant the masses had a new master. The mongols conquered china but china is still chinese. The arabs conquered iran but iran's still iranian. The brits conquered india but india is still indian.
> especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
But turks don't speak persian or armenian. They speak turkish. They don't use armenian script but used arabic alphabet previously and now the latin alphabet. Turks aren't christian or zoroastrian or buddhist, but are muslim.
A predominantly genetic iranian/armenian population that speaks turkish, is muslim and uses the latin alphabet. That's pretty diverse.
> And that these were necessary only because semi-regular invasions were basically a fact of life back then.
I remember my Turkish guide proudly saying that these dwellings have not been settled for centuries "because we were never invaded again so we don't need to hide here anymore".
> almost nothing man-made is more than a couple hundred years old
Visit more archaeological sites in your country. If it’s the USA, maybe cliff dwellings would interest?
https://www.nps.gov/meve/learn/historyculture/cliff_dwelling...
> it's wild to see a whole underground city made by human hands thousands of years go.
Fun fact: those cities buried in hills on the plain are called "tells".
They're called "tells" because, thousands and thousands of years ago when Mesopotamia spoke Old Akkadian, they were called "tells". The concept was old then.
Underground cities are fascinating. A similar one is Naours, with it's 300 rooms https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cite-souterraine-de-naou...
All Cappadocia area is like a visit to another planet. Ihlara valley, Zelve open air museum, Uchisar castle, hot air balloons, cave systems. Very strange place.
Any mention of lost archaeology these days reminds me of the LiDAR surveys being down in Mexico and South America that are finding not just lost cities, but entire lost metropolitan areas (with suburbs, trade routes in between, etc.). It makes me wonder if there are analogues in places like West and Central Africa. A YouTube video I'd watched about African architecture posited that there is probably much to be discovered, as the quality of vernacular housing doesn't seem to match the pride in craftsmanship of other artifacts. Turkey is, historically, one of the most consistently populated places on the planet, going back into antiquity, so if large structures there (even purposely hidden ones) can go lost for literal millennia, how lucky would one have to be to stumble upon one in more sparsely-populated regions?
Part of the thing is that we do know of at least some African places that were purposefully destroyed during colonization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Expedition_of_1897#The_p...
https://talkafricana.com/african-cities-that-were-completely...
Someone should have a Google Earth sort of map of all of the underground sites like Derinkuyu, Cappadocia, Turkey; Kaymakli, Cappadocia, Turkey; Beijing Underground City (Dixia Cheng), Beijing, China; SubTropolis, Kansas City, USA; Naours, France; Orvieto, Italy; The Louisville Mega Cavern, Louisville, Kentucky, USA; RESO (The Underground City), Montreal, Canada; Cheyanne Mountain Complex, Colorado, USA; Raven Rock Mountain Complex (Site R), Pennsylvania, USA; Bunker-42 (Tagansky Protected Command Point), Moscow, Russia; Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, Virginia, USA; Wieliczka Salt Mine, Poland; Petra, Jordan; Catacombs of Paris, France; Odessa Catacombs, Odessa, Ukraine; Caltech Steam Tunnels, California, USA and all the other steam tunnel systems under campuses; Disney Utilidor System, Florida, USA; Gotthard Base Tunnel, Switzerland; Chiashan Air Force Base, Taiwan; Iranian Underground Missile Bases, Iran; Željava Air Base, Croatia/Bosnia and Herzegovina; Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, USA; York Cold War Bunker, England; Bundesbank Bunker Cochem, Germany; Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Norway; Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site, North Dakota, USA; Underground Project 131, China; Ark D-0 / Tito's Nuclear Bunker, Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bunk'art, Tirana, Albania; Greenbrier Bunker (Project Greek Island), West Virginia, USA; Tirpitz Bunker, Denmark; Camp Century (Project Iceworm), Greenland; Los Angeles Tunnels, California, USA; Guanajuato Tunnels, Mexico; Moffat Tunnel, Colorado, USA; The Channel Tunnel (Chunnel), United Kingdom/France; Chicago Tunnel Company Freight Tunnels, Illinois, USA; China Jinping Underground Laboratory, China; Sanford Underground Research Facility (Homestake Mine), South Dakota, USA; Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), Canada; Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS), Italy; Onkalo Spent Nuclear Fuel Repository, Finland; Hill Country Wine Cave, Texas Hill Country, USA; ALMA Sports Hall, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile; The Inside Home, Ammaneh, Iran; Deep Time Palace, Chang Chun, China; Sancaklar Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey; Villa Aa, Aarhus, Denmark; Hacienda de la Paz (LA Mansion), Los Angeles, USA.
Of course in their list of fictional gateways, they get the Shawshank Redemption example wrong: it was Rita Hayworth, not Raquel Welch. (I found a similar aggravating error recently in an (older) article on boingboing which erroneously credited the song Route 66 to Chuck Berry.
The posters changed over the years as he was digging the tunnel - the final one was indeed a poster of Raquel Welch.
fwiw, this article is more serious and concise for those of us who dont like this sort of long-winded stylistic prose.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkey...
Also this is all a bit white-washed. This underground was in use until the 1920's when the mass killing of Christian Ottomans across Anatolia happened, which is the largely unacknowledged Greek genocide. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.
It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
There's something positively evil about playing this up as some kind of whimsical "gee, what happened?" It was genocide.
tldr; This city is 'forgotten' because the Turks slaughtered the Greeks living there and chased off the survivors who would have had knowledge of its expansive underground.
[dead]
[flagged]
From the article,
Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
The anonymous Turk—no report mentions his name—had found a vast subterranean city, up to 18 stories and 280 feet (76 meters) deep and large enough to house 20,000 people. Who built it, and why? When was it abandoned, and by whom? History and geology provide some answers.
Well, if you are going there... also from the HN guidelines we find: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
The article is not very good and doesn't mention it but I believe excavations are ongoing on a new site much closer to the city center of Nevşehir. (It's the big municipality the other sites are also part of)
Why is there always a comment on everything from somebody who has to proclaim "its not new"?