Imagine walking through a field in central Turkey. It looks like any other dusty plain, maybe a few sheep grazing nearby, until you trip over a hole. That hole isn't a rabbit burrow. It’s a ventilation shaft leading down 280 feet into a literal metropolis carved out of volcanic rock. This isn't science fiction. It is Derinkuyu, one of the most famous cities of the underworld ever discovered, and honestly, the more we learn about these places, the weirder they get.
People used to think these were just temporary bunkers. "Oh, they just hid there for a week when the Persians showed up," was the vibe. But you don't build schools, wine presses, and oil storage for 20,000 people if you’re only planning on staying for the weekend. These were sophisticated, permanent urban ecosystems that operated entirely in the dark.
The Reality of Living Underground
The engineering is actually terrifying when you think about it. If you’re building a skyscraper, you add material. If you’re building a city beneath the earth, you remove it. One wrong cut and the whole ceiling crushes your entire civilization. In the Cappadocia region, the rock is "tuff"—soft volcanic ash that’s easy to carve but hardens when it hits the air. It’s perfect for DIY architecture, but it requires a level of geological intuition that we still don't fully give the ancients credit for.
Take the ventilation. In Derinkuyu, there are over 15,000 small shafts that bring air down to the lowest levels. Even on the eighth floor down, the air is crisp. It’s better than most New York City subways. They also had these massive circular stone doors, some weighing half a ton, that could only be opened from the inside. They were essentially panic rooms on a municipal scale.
Why did they do it?
Security is the obvious answer. Between the 7th and 11th centuries, during the Arab-Byzantine wars, being visible was a death sentence. So, they just... disappeared. They took their livestock, their grain, and their families and vanished into the floor. You could have ten thousand people living right under your boots and never hear a sound. It’s the ultimate stealth move.
🔗 Read more: Entry Into Dominican Republic: What Most People Get Wrong
Not Just Turkey: The Global Phenomenon
While Cappadocia gets all the Instagram love, cities of the underworld are a global trend. Look at the Orvieto Underground in Italy. The Etruscans started digging there over 2,500 years ago. They didn't just dig basements; they dug a mirrored version of the city above. They had pozzolana quarries and sophisticated pigeon-breeding rooms.
Pigeons.
In the dark.
They used them for food and communication. It sounds grim, but it’s remarkably efficient. Then you have the Naours caves in France, which were used by locals to hide during the Thirty Years' War. There are thousands of pieces of graffiti on the walls there, left by soldiers from World War I who stumbled upon the tunnels centuries later. It’s like a physical timeline of human anxiety.
The Mystery of Petra's Lower Levels
We all know the Treasury at Petra. It’s the "Indiana Jones" building. But what most people miss is that the visible structures are just the tip of the iceberg. Archeologists like Dr. Sarah Parcak have used satellite imagery to find massive, buried structures that suggest the Nabataeans were basically living in a multi-level rock-cut world. It wasn't just a graveyard. It was a functioning city where water management was the highest form of technology. They moved water through terracotta pipes in a desert, keeping the "underworld" cool and hydrated while the sun baked the surface at 100 degrees.
💡 You might also like: Novotel Perth Adelaide Terrace: What Most People Get Wrong
The Technical Nightmare of Archeology
Working in these sites is a claustrophobic mess. You can't just bring in a backhoe. Most of the time, it’s hand-tools and brushes. The humidity is often 90%, and the dust—ancient, pulverized rock—is brutal on the lungs.
There's also the problem of "cultural layering." In many cities of the underworld, you’ll find a Roman coin next to a Byzantine cross, inside a room that looks like it was originally carved by the Hittites in 1500 BCE. It’s a mess to date. We often rely on organic material like charcoal or bone for carbon dating, but in a clean-swept stone room, that’s hard to find. We are basically guessing based on tool marks and pottery shards.
What We Get Wrong About the "Underworld"
The biggest misconception is that these were "primitive" people living like moles. Honestly, the social organization required to run Derinkuyu is mind-boggling.
- Waste Management: You can't just have 20,000 people using the bathroom in a cave. They had specialized drainage systems and used pots that were carried out at night.
- Lighting: They used linseed oil lamps. The walls in many tunnels still have small blackened niches where the lamps sat.
- Psychology: How do you keep a population from losing their minds in total darkness? They built chapels. They built communal meeting squares. They made it feel like home.
It wasn't a dungeon. It was a choice.
The Modern Connection
Believe it or not, we’re doing it again. Look at the "RESO" or the Underground City in Montreal. It’s 20 miles of tunnels connecting shopping malls, hotels, and subways. People spend their entire winter down there without ever seeing the sun. Or Coober Pedy in Australia, where the opal miners live in "dugouts" because the surface temperature is literally high enough to cook an egg on a rock.
📖 Related: Magnolia Fort Worth Texas: Why This Street Still Defines the Near Southside
We think of cities of the underworld as ancient relics, but they are actually a proven blueprint for climate adaptation. As the surface gets hotter or more volatile, the earth’s thermal mass—which stays a constant 55 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit—becomes the most valuable real estate on the planet.
How to Explore Them Safely
If you’re actually going to visit one of these sites, don't just go to the tourist traps.
- Go to Kaymakli, not just Derinkuyu. It’s wider and less "stairway-heavy," giving you a better sense of how the living quarters actually functioned.
- Check the humidity. If you have asthma, be careful. These places are damp and the air is heavy with minerals.
- Hire a local. The "official" signs are often 20 years out of date. The locals know which tunnels have been recently cleared by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
- Look at the ceilings. You can see the pickaxe marks. It helps you realize that every single inch of that space was created by a human being swinging a piece of metal.
The real takeaway from these cities of the underworld isn't just that people were good at digging. It's that they were incredibly resilient. When the world above became too dangerous or too hot or too chaotic, they didn't give up. They just moved the world downstairs.
To understand these places, you have to stop looking at them as caves. They aren't holes in the ground; they are monuments to the human refusal to go extinct. If you want to see the future of architecture, you might need to stop looking at the skyline and start looking at your feet.
The next step for anyone interested in this is to look into the underground mapping projects currently happening in Rome and Naples. Using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), archeologists are finding thousands of miles of tunnels that haven't been seen in two millennia. You can actually volunteer for some of these "citizen science" mapping projects online or visit the Sotterranei di Roma to see the work in progress. It’s the closest thing we have to real-life time travel.