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Derinkuyu underground city

Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu Underground City

There are so many underground cities at Cappadocia area of Turkey. Noone can know how many underground city there are. The biggest and deepest is Derinkuyu Underground City. There are eight floors and extend at a depth of approximately 85 m.

The underground city at Derinkuyu has all the usual amenities found in other underground complexes across Cappadocia, such as wine and oil presses, stables, cellars, storage rooms, refectories, and chapels. Unique to the Derinkuyu undergorund city complex and located on the second floor is a spacious room with a barrel vaulted ceiling. It has been reported that this room was used as a religious school and the rooms to the left were studies. Between the third and fourth levels is a vertical staircase. This passage way leads to a cruciform church on the lowest level.

Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu Underground City

The large 55 m ventilation shaft appears to have been used as a well. The shaft also provided water to both the villagers above and, if the outside world was not accessible, to those in hiding. First built by the Phrygians in the 8th –7th centuries B.C according to the Turkish Department of Culture, the Derinkuyu underground city was enlarged in the Byzantine era. The city could be closed from inside with large stone doors. With storerooms and wells that made long stays possible, the city had air shafts which are up to 100 feet (30 m) deep. Derinkuyu is the largest excavated underground city in Turkey. The complex has a total 11 floors, though many floors have not been excavated. It has an area of 2,000 square feet, with a possible total area of 7,000 square feet (650 m2). Each floor could be closed off separately. The city was connected with other underground cities through miles of long tunnels. The city could accommodate between 20,000 and 50,000 people.

Derinkuyu Underground City
Derinkuyu Underground City
undergroundcity_life
Underground city life

Derinkuyu is by no means the only such city you can visit here. There are actually 40 or so subterranean settlements in the area although only a few are open to the public.

It is in Derinkuyu District that is almost 30 km to Nevsehir, on Nevsehir – Nigde road.

Derinkuyu Underground City Video

Derinkuyu underground city entrance fee is 75 TL (2023), in summer open 8.00 and close 19.00, in winter open 8.00 and close 17.00.


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5 thoughts on “Derinkuyu underground city”

  1. Recent research by Turkish Historian Omer Demir, author of Cappadocia: Cradle of Civilization, has developed the idea that this huge underground city complex was designed and built at the end of the Palaeolithic era, right before the anti-diluvian flood mentioned in the Bible, 12,5000 years ago and that the Phrygians merely discovered and expanded on this already megalithic structure. Due to the problematic ability of archeologists to date solid volcanic rock, no definitive era can be determined for its construction.

    Its location near Mt. Arafat where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the flood, the nearness to the megalithic structure of Gobekli Tepi and the fact that each floor could be sealed off from the one above it by half ton, water tight doorways of solid rock suggest that it was designed and built by architects on a grand scale to withstand flooding.

    The fact that Derinkuyu is only one small city (yet could still hold as many as 25 to 50 thousand people) in a complex of over 200 cities, linked by miles of tunnels and the recently discovered (2014) ‘unknown to history’ city below the modern city of Nevsechir an hour drive North of Derinkuyu that dwarfs Derinkuyu by tenfold, suggests that this vast complex has yet to be thoroughly explored or understood.

    I suggest that this city complex was designed and built around the time of Noah’s Ark and the ‘Sinking of Atlantis’ for humanity to survive the coming deluge that was obviously a well known fact. Noah would not have been able to design and build an Ark (submarine) of the dimensions written about in the Bible without advanced knowledge and highly technical assistance. So it is not a stretch to imagine that a city complex on the scale of the U.S. Deep Underground Military Bases (D.U.M.B.s) could be built as well.

    The advanced technology and knowledge needed to build an underground city of such complexity would require architects and stone masons, capable of building such megalithic structures as the Giza Pyramids and Gobekli Tepi, while moving tons of rock. The thousands of tons of rock that would need to be moved to create this city complex has never been found, perhaps the flood swept it away.

    1. This is not what I remember from years ago. My memory may be jaded due to time. I learned this was built due to a primitive culture being told by their god that a freeze was coming and to gather two of each animal and people for mating. I was taught this was where Noah’s ark story originated from. There were carvings of their god on walls.
      Later, due to persecution of Christians, they used the underground city and placed their art on walls.
      This was the original stories of this underground city as I learned years ago.
      The people began with a Z and they were destroyed by Christians.

  2. When I visited Goreme in the late 1960’s, a farmer, who had just discovered an entrance to a brand new underground city in his field, wanted me to help him to outfit it with lights and other equipment so that he could turn it into a tourist site. I had no money to invest in that. But it happens regularly.

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