Cappadocia is a fine place to visit, but honestly visiting Derinkuyu was not a highlight. If you see the photo half-way down the article, it basically all looks like that, and it's much cooler to know it exists than to actually see it in person.
I thought the opposite - the underground city was the highlight of my trip to Turkey! Being down where people have walked for thousands of years, imagining the living conditions and what would make people do such a thing (e.g. retreat for decades to hide from an occupying force), was incredible. Sure, visually it's just holes in rocks - but so are a lot of other things worth seeing too.
Turkey has tons of off the beaten path sites to see that are not as touristy. There are underground cities that are completely open to visit. You drive up and there’s just a dark hole in the side of a hill, such as Han near Afyon…
There are two types of people in this world (well, at least two): Those who dream of underground living spaces or secret hideouts/tunnels, and those who don't. Count me among the former. Thanks for the link!
A strange and beautiful place. I was last there in 2007, I think it was, but I first visited as a kid in 1987. Cappadocia is one of my favorite places on earth. <3
In my fantasy imagination of alternative history, this is evidence of an ancient civilization surviving a nuclear winter involving the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.
When shut off from the world above, the city was ventilated by a total of more than 15,000 shafts, most about 10 cm wide and reaching down into the first and second levels of the city. This ensured sufficient ventilation down to the eighth level.
I imagine the lower relative temperature of the well shafts would cause cool fresh air to sink, and the heated (by humans and animals) stale air would rise up and escape via the mentioned shafts, much like a traditional passive heating system in an old house. As long as the area doesn't get too humid (unlikely in that area) then the latent heat of evaporation would generate more than enough temperature delta to setup quite strong air currents, more than enough to keep the air fresh in the caves
