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?
