Hidden From View

One of Cappadocia’s underground cities may yet yield clues about its history.

- Bill Donahue

The landscape of Cappadocia in central Turkey is dry and jagged and strange. Winding roads look out onto mountain peaks rising to almost 13,000 feet, and vast canyons and cliff faces have been striped dark brown, rusty red, and sandy yellow over the epochs. Pigeons, first introduced into the region by the Romans, wing by at eye level. Fantastical 40- to 50-foot-high “fairy chimneys”—spires of soft volcanic tuff—rise up from the desert floor. Carved into some of these hillsides are houses—some recently built and some centuries old—with rough wooden doors, small windows, and storage areas overhung by high shelves of stone. There are even rock-cut garages where drivers swoop into the dark and then cut their engines.

This picturesque region draws more than two million tourists a year, and everywhere there are road signs directing visitors to ancient settlements carved into the rock, such as Derinkuyu, a large underground city that plunges 280 feet into the earth. It dates to at least as far back as the Byzantine era, features stables, wineries, and churches, and may once have been home to tens of thousands of people. There is also Göreme, where an array of tombs and temples were carved directly into the hillside starting in the eleventh century a.d. Another of these sites, an impressive honeycomb of rooms intended as a year-round rock settlement, overlooks the modern downtown of the provincial capital of Nevsehir, or “New City.”