What do you think about this?
In 1963, a man in the Cappadocia region of Turkey knocked down a wall in his basement during a renovation and found a passage. Behind it was a room. Behind that room, another. What he had stumbled into was Derinkuyu, an entire city carved straight down into soft volcanic rock, descending as much as eighteen levels and roughly eighty five meters underground.
It had stables, kitchens, wine presses, chapels, ventilation shafts, and massive round stone doors that could seal each level from the inside. Estimates say it could shelter close to twenty thousand people along with their livestock and food for months. The best guess puts the first digging with the Phrygians well over two thousand years ago, and Byzantine Christians later widened it and sheltered in it. Nobody is certain who broke the first ground, or exactly when, or what they were hiding from. Whole communities lived underground here and then, apparently, moved on.
Is it possible people carved a city for twenty thousand into solid rock and we have forgotten who they were or what drove them down there?
A refuge from invading armies, or an escape from something else entirely? What do you think Derinkuyu was really built to survive?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a farmer in Sardinia struck stone and uncovered an army of giants, dozens of statues over seven feet tall with double circle eyes, around three thousand years old. Someone smashed them and buried them. What were the giants meant to be?
What do you think about this? On the coast of Brittany stand more than three thousand stones in rows that run for miles, raised before Stonehenge and before the pyramids. Nobody left an explanation. A lost astronomy, a forgotten faith, or something we have no word for?
What do you think about this? In 1963 a man in Turkey knocked out a basement wall and found a city cut eighteen levels down, with stone doors that sealed from the inside and room for twenty thousand people. Nobody is certain who dug it. What were they hiding from?
What do you think about this? In 1934 the LA Times ran a front page story about a labyrinth under downtown built by an ancient Lizard People. The city let a mining engineer sink a shaft 250 feet down. Then the money ran out. A fantasy, or a real anomaly under the city?
What do you think about this? In Cholula, Mexico there is a hill with a pretty yellow church on top. It is the largest pyramid ever built, bigger by volume than Giza, swallowed by grass until it looked like ordinary ground. Lost knowledge, deliberate burial, or just time?
What do you think about this? A short boat ride from Venice sits Poveglia, an island so tied to plague dead and a shuttered asylum that it has been closed to visitors for decades. Fishermen steer around it. Grim history and imagination, or ground that holds onto something?
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