Derinkuyu Underground City

A refuge city, more than 85 metres down

Derinkuyu is carved into tuff, the soft stone that volcanic ash left across Cappadocia and that the whole region digs like wood. It extends to a depth of roughly 85 metres and the tunnels run through 18 levels, which makes it the largest excavated underground city in Turkey and, on the BBC's wider claim, the largest excavated anywhere. Wikipedia's history section puts its shelter capacity at as many as 20,000 people together with their livestock and food stores: stables, wine and oil presses, cellars, refectories, kitchens with the same tandoor ovens villagers still use, and chapels.

What you visit is a fraction of that. The state tourism portal's figure is that only about 10 percent of the complex is visitable, which is why an hour underground is the whole show rather than a disappointment.

The builder question has no settled answer

Ask who built Derinkuyu and the honest answer is that the dating is contested. The tunnels may have been first cut in the Phrygian period, in the 8th to 7th centuries BC, and the BBC records a competing Hittite hypothesis, with Hittite artefacts found inside, alongside the observation that Xenophon's Anabasis of about 370 BC is the oldest written work hinting at people living underground in this region. What all the sources agree on is the shape of the later story: the city was fully formed in the Byzantine era, when Christian inhabitants expanded simple cave homes into a multi-level refuge with chapels and Greek inscriptions, and it was significantly enlarged during the Arab–Byzantine wars.

Any guide who gives you a single confident date for the beginning is selling certainty the evidence does not hold.

Forgotten in 1923, found again in 1963

The refuge had a long afterlife. It sheltered Christians from Seljuk raids in the 11th century and from Timur's incursions in the 14th, and the Cambridge linguist R. M. Dawkins recorded townspeople still hiding underground as late as 1909, after the Adana massacres. In 1923 the Christian population left in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the city was abandoned, its entrances forgotten.

It came back to light in 1963, when a resident renovating his house knocked through a basement wall and found a room behind it. More than 600 separate entrances have since been discovered, some of them under the basements of private houses in the town above, which is why the modern entrance sits in an ordinary street and not in a fenced archaeological park.

The variable that decides your routing is the one-way loop. Visitors go down through the levels and come up by a different staircase, and the tightest stretches are single file, so your pace is partly the pace of the line ahead of you. With about 10 percent of the complex open, the difference between a short visit and a full one is attention, not distance.

Low, narrow and single file

The passages are intentionally defensive, and the BBC's visitor description matches what the layout implies: hallways short enough and narrow enough that you move stooped and single file through the tightest stretches, with the walls darkened by centuries of soot. Most adults duck at the doorway lintels without thinking about it. The light is dim and even, the air still, and in the rooms between groups the silence is the thing people remember.

If you are tall, expect your back and your shoulders to do real work. If you are at all unhurried by nature, the queue ahead of you will decide your speed.

How 20,000 people breathed

The air you are breathing down there is the engineering. More than 50 ventilation shafts reach the levels below, and the widest central shafts connect many levels with the openings of no two levels ever overlapping, a layout that reads as deliberate airflow design. One shaft served as a well more than 55 metres deep, giving water to the town above and, when the surface was not safe, to the city below, where it could be cut off from below so nobody could be poisoned or lowered down it.

Stand under a shaft for a moment and you can feel the column of cool air moving.

The millstone doors

Half-ton circular stones, rolled across doorways from the inside only, sealed each level separately. The round hole in the centre of the millstone doors had a working purpose as well as a defensive one, the kind of detail guides demonstrate with a hand: sight, spear, or both, depending which source you believe. You will pass several of these doors standing half open in their slots, and they are the photograph most visitors take.

They are also original load-bearing archaeology, not reproductions, so hands off.

A straight claustrophobia test

Decide before you buy, not at the third level down. If a crowded cinema aisle, a church crypt or an airline middle seat makes your chest tighten, Derinkuyu's deepest stretches will be genuinely unpleasant: there are points where two people cannot pass and the ceiling asks you to bend. The route is a loop with staff stationed along it, and leaving partway is possible, but the honest framing is that the site is not suitable for anyone who cannot manage repeated stooping on worn, uneven steps, and it does not work for wheelchairs or pushchairs at all.

Visitors who want the underground-city experience with more generous rooms should do Kaymaklı first and keep Derinkuyu for a confident day.

Derinkuyu opens 08:00 to 18:45 every day, with the ticket office keeping the same hours and no weekly closed day at all. The ticket itself needs no planning: $14.90 (€13) at the gate, the same undated ticket the Ministry sells on muze.gov.tr, and the MuseumPass Cappadocia e-card, $74.51 (€65) for 3 days with one entry per site, covers this gate like every other Ministry ticket in the region. The full price picture is on the Derinkuyu tickets page.

The quiet logic is simple. The site has no timed entry, so the crowd arrives when the minibuses arrive, which from April to October is mid morning, when the green tours come down from Göreme. The first hour after opening and the last hour before close are the slots where you walk at your own pace.

• Emptiest: 08:00–09:00, and after 17:00 in season
• Busiest: 10:00 to about 13:00, when the day tours cycle through (our observation)
• Last practical entry: about an hour before close, so by 17:45 for the full route

By car or by tour, 45 road-minutes

Derinkuyu sits about 45 minutes south of Göreme down the plateau road, an easy drive that most visitors never make because the tours make it for them. The guided green tour is the classic pairing, Derinkuyu in the morning then the Ihlara gorge and Selime, at $20 for the seat. The red and green combined day tour folds the underground city into both loops if you have a single day.

And the full-day private car with a licensed guide is the version where you arrive at opening with the site to yourselves, which is worth $211.65 to some families and a wild overpay for everyone else. The routing options are gathered on the day trips from Göreme page.

By dolmuş, with a change in Nevşehir

There is no direct minibus from Göreme. The route runs Göreme to Nevşehir's otogar, then a second minibus from the otogar toward Derinkuyu, and it works, slowly. Here is the finding worth printing: no official fare table or timetable for these rural minibuses is published online at all, the operator's own pages cover the Göreme–Avanos–Ürgüp corridor only, so you confirm times at the otogar on the day.

Carry lira cash, small notes, and do not attempt the dolmuş version if you have a fixed afternoon plan. The practicalities of minibuses across the region are on getting around Cappadocia.

- Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı were connected. Wikipedia's history section carries the 8–9 km of tunnels linking the two cities, a corridor you cannot walk today but which explains why the two sites feel like one system when you visit both [Wikipedia, History section]. - The air was engineered, not hoped for. More than 50 ventilation shafts reach the lower levels, and the 55-metre well could be sealed from below during a siege, so the city could not be starved of air or water from the surface [BBC Travel]. - The stables were at the top for two reasons. Keeping livestock nearest the surface took the smell and the gases away from the living levels and used the animals' body heat as warm insulation for the cold months [BBC Travel]. - There was a school down there. The spacious barrel-vaulted room on the second floor is reported as a religious school, with the rooms to its left used for study, which tells you the refugees planned on staying months, not hours [Wikipedia, Architecture section]. - The name is the hydrology. Derinkuyu means deep well, after the shafts that watered the settlement and the town above it, and the town's Cappadocian Greek name was Malakopi, plausibly from the Greek for soft, after the tuff everyone kept digging [Wikipedia, Etymology section].

Two shapes work. The tour day: the guided green tour takes Derinkuyu in the morning, then drops into the Ihlara gorge and finishes at Selime, back in Göreme for the evening, which is why it is the region's standard first full day. The do-it-yourself day: a rental car at the 08:00 opening, Derinkuyu before the coaches, lunch in the town, then Kaymaklı on the way back north and still home before the light goes, since Kaymaklı keeps its ticket window open to 19:15.

If you are counting days rather than hours, the three-day Göreme itinerary places both underground cities, the things to do in Göreme list ranks everything else, and the Göreme map shows the whole circuit. The Göreme city guide homepage holds the rest.