Derinkuyu Was Carved 18 Storeys Deep Into Solid Rock — It Held 20,000 People Underground

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]The passage narrows after 12 meters. The ceiling drops. You are stooping now, one hand on the wall, and the stone under your fingers is warm ochre, smooth where 10,000 hands have touched it before yours. The air is 13°.

[00:00:17]You know this because your breath has stopped forming clouds, and the sweat on your neck has gone cold. Ahead of you, the tunnel descends at a gradient steep enough that you place each foot with care. You are on the second level. There are 16 more below you. This is Daring Cuyu, an underground city carved 18 stories into solid volcanic rock beneath an ordinary Turkish farming town. It held 20,000 people. It has over 600 entrances, 50 ventilation shafts, rolling stone doors that weigh 300 kg a piece, and a crucififor church on the lowest accessible floor reached by staircases cut vertically through the rock. Only eight of its 18 levels are open. The rest are sealed. No comprehensive survey of what lies below the eighth floor has ever been published.

[00:01:13]I came to Daring Cuyu because of a line in a 60-year-old excavation notice filed with the Nev Shaher provincial government, but the city's story begins long before that document. The discovery, as it is usually told, has the flavor of domestic accident. In 1963, a man in the town of Daringuyu in the Capidoshia region of central Turkey was renovating his cellar. He swung a hammer into the back wall, and the wall gave way into darkness. Behind it was a passage. Behind the passage was a room.

[00:01:50]Behind the room was another passage. His chickens, according to the local account, had been vanishing through a crack in the floor for years. He had assumed rats. He had not assumed a city.

[00:02:04]The geology makes it possible. The Capidoshian plateau sits on a bed of volcanic turf deposited over millions of years by the eruptions of da and hassand.

[00:02:16]Tough is unusual. When freshly exposed, it is soft enough to carve with hand tools, a pick, a chisel, a sharpened piece of harder stone. But once exposed to air, it oxidizes and hardens into something remarkably durable.

[00:02:33]This is the property that made Capidoshia habitable underground.

[00:02:38]You can shape the rock when you reach it, and the rock will hold its shape for millennia after you leave. The color shifts as you descend, from pale cream near the surface to a deep ochre further down, and the tall marks in the lower levels are visibly different from those above. I have seen this. The strokes are longer, more confident, cut by people who understood the stone intimately. The dating is contested. The Turkish Ministry of Culture attributes the earliest construction to the Friians, roughly the 8th century B.C.E.

[00:03:13]Some scholars argue for the Hittites, which would push the origin back to the second millennium B.C.E.

[00:03:20]There is no consensus, and I want to be clear about that.

[00:03:24]What exists is a site whose oldest layers predate any written record of its construction.

[00:03:30]The earliest textual reference I've been able to confirm is from Zenapon's anabis written around 370 B.CE in which he describes the people of the Anatolian interior living in underground dwellings with entrances like wells. The description is brief but specific. It matches the vertical shaft entrances that still punctuate the town above Daringuyu today.

[00:03:56]The Byzantine period expanded the complex significantly. The crucififor church on the lowest accessible level dates from this era along with missionary schools and baptismal pools carved directly into the rock. For centuries, the underground city served as a refuge, a seasonal shelter, a place of worship, and in times of invasion, a fortress. The rolling stone doors, each one carved from a single block and fitted into curved channels, could seal a level entirely from below. They were operable only from the inside. Then in 1923, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey displaced the Capidosian Greek community that had maintained continuous knowledge of these underground spaces for generations.

[00:04:46]Families who had used the tunnels as storage as shelters during Ottoman era violence as living memory of what each level contained and how each ventilation shaft connected were moved to Greece.

[00:05:00]The Turkish families who settled in the town above inherited houses built over entrances to chambers they did not know existed.

[00:05:09]For 40 years the city below them was silent. Here is where the record goes quiet, not silenced, not classified, simply never written.

[00:05:20]The site was open to tourists in 1969, 6 years after the cellar wall came down.

[00:05:27]Eight levels were made accessible, walkways were installed, lighting was fitted, and a modest visitor circuit was established, but excavation in any formal archaeological sense stalled.

[00:05:42]I checked the major international databases for published excavation reports on Daring Cuyu. What I found were survey articles, tourist guides, geological assessments, and a handful of academic papers focused on ventilation or tough composition.

[00:05:59]I have not been able to locate a comprehensive peer-reviewed excavation report covering even the eight accessible levels, let alone the 10 that remain sealed. The artifact collection held in the Nev Shaher Museum has never, to my knowledge, been cataloged in a form accessible to independent researchers. What do you do with a 3,000-year-old city when the people who understood it are gone and the people who inherited it have no institutional memory of what it is? The site was not abandoned. It was administered.

[00:06:33]And administration, it turns out, can be its own form of burial.

[00:06:39]Consider the ventilation system. There are more than 50 shafts, the deepest extending 55 m from the surface to the lowest known level.

[00:06:50]These are not crude holes. They are engineered airways positioned to create differential pressure that draws fresh air downward through the inhabited levels and pushes stale air upward through separate channels.

[00:07:03]I have stood at the base of one of these shafts on the second level and felt the pull of air moving past my face, steady and constant, driven by nothing more than the geometry of the shaft and the temperature difference between the surface and the deep rock. The system works. It works today without maintenance, without power after what may be 3,000 years. The water supply is equally deliberate. Some levels are connected to wells that reach the surface. Others are deliberately disconnected, and this appears to be by design. During a siege, an attacker who poisoned the surface wells would contaminate only the upper levels. The lower levels drew from separate sources sealed off by stone plugs that could be removed or replaced from below.

[00:07:56]I am working from secondary descriptions here because the primary survey data if it exists in a compiled form has not been made available to me. But the defensive logic is consistent across every account I have read and it is consistent with what I saw in the accessible levels.

[00:08:15]In 1909, a British scholar named William Dawkins visited the Capidosian town of Axo near Daring Cuyu and documented a community retreating underground at news of massacres in the region. His fieldwork conducted between 1909 and 1911 described a population that used these underground cities not as relics but as living infrastructure.

[00:08:41]Families moved livestock, grain, and water supplies below ground within hours. The ventilation shafts doubled as communication channels. The rolling stone doors were maintained and tested.

[00:08:55]This was not archaeology. This was a functioning civil defense system observed by a western academic within living memory of people alive today. Now consider what happened in 2014.

[00:09:09]Construction workers in the nearby city of Nev Shahir excavating foundations for a housing project broke through into an underground complex that initial surveys suggested could span 400,000 square meters that is significantly larger than Daring Cuyu. The housing project was halted. The Turkish government announced the discovery.

[00:09:33]Preliminary reports described multi-level passages, ventilation shafts, and carved chambers consistent with the Daringuyu model, but at a scale that dwarfed it. I checked for follow-up publications in 2016, again in 2019, and most recently in 2024.

[00:09:53]The site remains largely unexavated. The housing project remains suspended. No comprehensive excavation report has been published. Go back now to the months after the 1963 discovery to a man I have pieced together from local accounts and provincial records. He is not named in any document I have found. He is a laborer hired from the town above to clear rubble from the newly opened passages. He carries a lantern and a length of rope. He is not an archaeologist. He has no training in strategraphy or survey methodology.

[00:10:29]He is a local man, and his grandfather drew water from a well that passed through these very chambers without ever knowing they existed. He is lowered by rope past the eighth level into a passage that no one living has entered in at least 40 years. His lantern throws a circle of yellow light across walls carved in long, confident strokes. Ahead of him, a rolling stone door sits in its channel, sealed but not locked. He pushes it. The stone moves. The channel is cut so precisely that a 300 kg disc rolls on a slight touch after centuries of stillness.

[00:11:11]Behind the door, a chamber opens, its ceiling higher than the levels above.

[00:11:16]Its walls unmarked by the soot that blackens the kitchens and schools on the upper floors.

[00:11:23]The ventilation shaft beside him drops away into a darkness his lantern cannot reach.

[00:11:28]The air moves. It moves steadily and it moves upward which means the shaft is open somewhere below which means there are more levels which means this city continues deeper than anyone in the town above has known for a generation. If Darren Cuyu is the 10% we can see what does the other 90% contain? And why after 60 years has no one finished looking?

[00:11:56]Go back to the site. Go back to the passage below the eighth level to the months just after the discovery before the barriers went up. The laborer is alone now. His rope trails behind him into the dark. His lantern is failing, the flame shortening as the fuel burns down, and the passage ahead curves gently to the left, descending.

[00:12:20]He places his hand on the wall. The stone is cool, not cold, not warm. Held at a temperature the rock has maintained since before anyone carved it. Under his fingers, he feels the groove left by a tool. A long, steady stroke made by someone who may have lived a thousand years before Christ. He does not know this. He knows only that the air is moving, which means the shaft above is open, which means he can breathe. He knows the stone is sound. He knows the passage is dry. He will go home tonight to the town above and sleep in a house built over rooms he has just seen for the first time. His name was never recorded. The details of what he found were never published. Within five years, the levels he explored will be sealed behind safety barriers, and the passage he descended will carry a sign reading that access is restricted to authorized personnel.

[00:13:20]What he saw, what he touched, what he could have described, belongs now only to the stone. I stood on the second level for a long time before I left. The barrel vated ceiling of what is called the missionary school was black with centuries of smoke.

[00:13:38]The acoustic quality underground is extraordinary. Sound does not carry. It stops. Words spoken in one chamber do not reach the next. The silence is not empty. It is held in place by the rock itself, by the density of the tough, by the geometry of passages designed to contain not just people, but the sounds they made.

[00:14:02]I walked the visitor circuit and counted the ventilation shafts I could see. I counted seven. There are more than 50.

[00:14:10]The scale of what is hidden dwarfs the scale of what is shown.

[00:14:15]Daring cuyu is not a story about suppression. No one ordered this city buried. No government classified its contents. The rock itself was carved by people who understood that survival sometimes means going deeper than anyone thinks possible.

[00:14:31]The knowledge of how to live here, how to breathe here, how to seal a city against an army and feed a population in darkness was carried in the minds of a community displaced a century ago. What remains is stone. The stone is extraordinary. But stone without memory is architecture without meaning.

[00:14:53]How many levels of knowledge do we seal off simply by failing to ask what lies below? The stone remains. The people who understood it are gone. Daringuyu is open to visitors eight levels deep.

[00:15:07]Below that, the doors are shut. No one is digging.