The History of Derinkuyu Underground City

How a network of rooms carved into soft volcanic rock became a refuge for thousands — and why the full story of who first dug Derinkuyu is still debated.

Uncertain beginnings

The earliest history of Derinkuyu is genuinely uncertain, and honest accounts say so. One widely cited view credits the Phrygians, an Iron Age people of central Anatolia, with cutting the first chambers around the 8th to 7th century BC. Others point to earlier or later hands. What is not in doubt is the raw material: the Cappadocian plateau is blanketed in tuff, a soft rock formed from volcanic ash, which can be dug with simple tools and hardens on contact with air. That geology made deep excavation possible long before modern machinery, and it is why the region holds dozens of underground settlements rather than one.

A Byzantine refuge

Whatever its origins, Derinkuyu reached its fullest use in the Byzantine centuries. As Arab–Byzantine warfare swept across Anatolia from the 7th century onward, the Christian communities of Cappadocia enlarged the underground cities into places of refuge. When raiders approached, whole populations could descend with their livestock and stores, seal the passages with heavy rolling stone doors, and wait out the danger below ground. Derinkuyu was built for exactly this: ventilation shafts to keep the air breathable, wells for water that could not be poisoned from the surface, and space for people and animals to live for extended periods.

The lower levels include a room widely read as a church or chapel, along with spaces interpreted as a school, stables, kitchens with blackened ceilings, and presses for wine or oil. Taken together they describe not a bunker but a functioning town that happened to be underground — one that could be lived in, not merely hidden in.

Later centuries and abandonment

The underground cities stayed in occasional use for centuries. Cappadocian Greek communities are recorded sheltering in them into the modern era, using the tunnels during periods of unrest as their ancestors had. That long thread of use ended with the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, when the region’s Greek-speaking inhabitants left. The cities fell quiet and, in places, out of local memory.

Rediscovery and opening

Derinkuyu returned to wider attention in 1963. The most repeated account holds that a resident, renovating a house, broke through a wall into a hidden room and found a passage leading down into the forgotten network. Whatever the precise trigger, the site was explored, cleared along a safe route, and opened to visitors in 1965. Only a portion of the full network — eight levels, thought to be around a tenth of the whole — is open today; the rest remains unexcavated or closed for safety.

Derinkuyu in its region

Derinkuyu is the deepest of the Cappadocian underground cities, but it is not alone. Scholars count dozens across the region — roughly three dozen underground settlements of varying size — with Kaymaklı, about 10 km to the north, the best known after Derinkuyu. The two are often said to be joined by a long connecting tunnel, a claim frequently reported but not part of the visitable route. All of this sits within the wider landscape that UNESCO inscribed in 1985 as Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia, better known for its fairy chimneys and rock-cut churches above ground than for the cities beneath it.