The World Without Us

Unlike a river canyon, the earliest segments here are nearest the surface. Some believe the first builders were the Hittites of biblical times, who burrowed underground to hide from marauding Phrygians. Murat Ertuğrul Gülyaz, an archaeologist at Cappadocia’s Nevşehir Museum, agrees that Hittites lived here, but doubts they were the first.

Gülyaz, a proud native with a moustache thick as a fine Turkish rug, worked on the excavation of Aşikli Höyük, a small Cappadocian mound containing the remains of a settlement even older than Çatal Höyük. Among the relics there were 10,000-year-old stone axes and obsidian tools capable of cutting tuff. “The underground cities are prehistoric,” he declares. That, he says, explains the crudeness of the upper chambers, compared to the precision of the rectangular floors below. “Later, every-one who appeared kept going deeper.”

Underground city, Derinkuyu, Cappadocia, Turkey.

PHOTO BY MURAT ERTUGRUL GÜLYAZ.

It’s as if they couldn’t stop, one conquering culture after another realizing the benefit of a hidden, sub-surface world. The underground cities were lit by torches, or often, Gülyaz discovered, by linseed oil lamps, which also gave enough heat to keep temperatures pleasant. Temperature was probably what first inspired humans to dig them, for winter shelter. But as successive waves of Hittites, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks, and Christians discovered these dens and warrens, they widened and deepened them for one principal reason: defense. The last two even expanded the original upper chambers enough to stable their horses underground.

The smell of tuff that permeates Cappadocia—cool, clayish, with a menthol tang—intensifies below. Its versatile nature allowed niches to be scooped where lamplight was needed, yet tuff is strong enough that Turkey considered using these nether cities as bomb shelters had the 1990 Persian Gulf War spread.

In the underground city of Derinkuyu, the floor below the stables held fodder bins for livestock. Next down was a communal kitchen, with earthen ovens placed below holes in nine-foot ceilings that, via offset rock tubes, channeled smoke to chimneys two kilometers away, so that enemies wouldn’t know where they were. For the same reason, ventilation shafts were also engineered on the skew.

Copious storage space and thousands of earthenware jars and urns suggest that thousands of people spent months down here without seeing the sun. Through vertical communication shafts, it was possible to speak to another person on any level. Underground wells provided their water; underground drains prevented flooding. Some water was routed through tuff conduits to underground wineries and breweries, equipped with tuff fermentation vats and basalt grinding wheels.

These beverages were probably essential for calming the claustrophobia induced by passing between levels via staircases so intentionally low, tight, and serpentine that any invaders had to proceed slowly, bent over, and in single file. Emerging one by one, they would be easily slain—if they got that far. Stairways and ramps had landings every 10 meters, with Stone Age pocket doors—half-ton, floor-to-ceiling stone wheels—that could be rolled in place to seal a passage. Trapped between a pair of these, intruders would soon notice that holes overhead weren’t air shafts, but pipes for bathing them with hot oil.

Another three floors below this underworld fortress, a room with a vaulted ceiling and benches facing a stone lectern was a school. Farther below were multiple levels of living quarters, strung along underground streets that branched and intersected for several square kilometers. They included double alcoves for adults with children, and even playrooms featuring pitch-black tunnels that returned to the same spot.

And farther: eight levels down in Derinkuyu, two large, high-ceilinged spaces join in a cruciform. Although, due to constant humidity, no frescoes or paintings remain, in this church, seventh-century Christians who emigrated from Antioch and Palestine would have prayed and hidden from Arab invaders.

Below it is a tiny, cube-shaped room. It was a temporary tomb, where the dead could be kept until danger passed. As Derinkuyu and the other underground cities passed from hand to hand and civilization to civilization, their citizens always returned to the surface, to bury their own in the soil where food grew under sun and rainfall.

The surface was where they were bred to live and die, but one day when we are long gone, it is the underground cities they built for protection that will defend humanity’s memory, bearing final—albeit hidden— witness to the fact that, once, we were here.

CHAPTER 9 Polymers Are Forever