Man Chasing Chicken Discovers Ancient Underground City
In 1963, a man in Derinkuyu, Turkey, couldn’t keep his chickens from disappearing. The chickens were kept in an apparently safe location; his basement. No wild animals, no place for the feathered beasts to hide, right? So where did they go?
One day he entered the basement in time to see a fluffy feathered rear disappearing into a crack in the back wall like a sock down a vacuum hose.
His next step was bold. Some might say, overreactive.
Those people have never owned chickens.
He took up a tool and began to bash down the wall. One shuddering blow fell after another. The remaining chickens probably huddled in the far corner in a pile of guilty feathers. The hole widened as the wall gave way, revealing a dark space beyond. A large space, with shadows too deep for the flashlight to reach. A second basement? Maybe the neighbors’ cellar?
Nope.
Just the world’s largest ancient subterranean city.
Derinkuyu is huge. It extends to a depth of about 280ft, a multi-level city (each level can be sealed separately from the inside by a rolling stone door), large enough to shelter as many as 20,000 people together with their livestock and food stores.
If you ever visit Turkey, please go see this beautiful place and send me photos. Please.
Some archeologists believe parts of the city could have been built as early as 2000BC by the Hittites, or by the Phrygians, around 700 BC. Others claim that Christians built the city to escape persecution between 200-400AD. Either way, the city most likely began as unconnected storage areas and was expanded as the years went on.
Why was the city forgotten?
In 1923, after the Greco-Turkish War, the two combatants agreed to swap minorities in order to ethnically homogenize their countries. The Cappadocian Greeks of Derinkuyu were taken away from their homes in Turkey and relocated to Greece. They took the secret of the underground city with them. The Greek name of the place: Mαλακοπια (Malakopia), means “soft” which could be in reference to the pliability of the stone in the area.
You can learn more about the city here and here.
What would you do if you discovered an ancient city in your basement? Are you keeping track of your chickens? Who wants to read a Gone Away Lake type story involving an underground city?
