20 years ago today - Day 257

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Friday, November 15th - Goreme

We are up in good time this morning because the tour bus for the underground city is leaving at 9 am. We eat breakfast at the pension with several of the other guests. There is a new Aussie named Elizabeth who seems quite sweet. Beate and Carla visited the Open Air Museum yesterday and are full of stories about strange rock formations, massive churches and multi-layered communities built into the rock walls. They say there is too much to see in a day.

When our bus tour leaves, our guide gives an overview of the place we are going. It is called Derinkuyu and it is the largest "underground city" in the Cappadocia region. It was originally started by the Phrygians and expanded by early Christians and later by Byzantines fleeing Arab oppression, but by others too, from the Greeks to Arab times. Derinkuyu has eleven floors underground, extending to a depth of 85 m. It was large enough to hold about 40,000 people, their livestock and their food stores. It was first opened to the public 22 years ago and only 10% of it is accessible to the public. This alone blows my mind. The guide also says there are 200 known underground settlements of two layers or more. Amazing!

The site is thirty kilometres south of Nevsehir. I expected its entrance to be accessed in a cleft in the mountains, something like the Ihlara Canyon, but it isn't. It is built in the centre of the valley, on otherwise open and indefensible ground. The opening is like a relative small crack in the ground, a ramp camouflaged with dry bushes. There is no indication that is something significant. Our guide leads us underground to the first level where the stables and livestock were and some grain storage. There is an enormous round stone with a hole in the middle used to block the entrance from unwanted intruders. There is a hole in the middle used for moving the stone or seeing who was on the outside. Then we climb down to a large vaulted room on the second floor which he says was probably used for schooling.


This floor is as extensive as the first and has lots of areas for food preparation, wine and oil presses, refectories and chapels. Most of the residences were on lower floors, connected by a maze of passageways and vertical staircases. The rooms are compact with many little storage shelves and little holes between some units used as communication holes. I keep wondering what if some kid spills something or pees in the corner. What would happen if they ran out of lamp oil? What if you were into kinky, fun sex and dirty talk? Ooops, I forget - these were Christians.

I wondered if I would get claustrophobic in here, but I don't. I imagine with 40,000 people in here it would be much stuffier. I suppose there were always plenty of children running around. If I was a kid here I'd go crazy running through the passageways and dropping things down holes to the chambers below.

The most amazing things about this colony are three 155 m deep air vents that go deeper than the lowest level to also serve as wells to provide water for the residents in times of siege. The intricate level of planning and engineering that is needed to build such a large settlement is mind-boggling. Still, I wonder how the smoke from cooking and heating fires in winter or the tracks of delivery carts and animals did not betray their secret location to their oppressors. My tour guide has not been asked these questions before. His plastic smile is about to crack. Instead of praising my deductive thought processes, he looks like he is ready to stuff a sock down my throat, so I shut up for the rest of the way back.

The three of us have gone out for a pasta dinner this evening, at an Italian restaurant that uses their ash cave appropriately as a wine cellar. Vincent and Coen are still getting a chuckle out of all my questions. What's so funny? I ask them. If I was a tour guide I would make sure I had researched the answers or, if I couldn't find the answers, I would have made up plausible ones up, such as the cartwheels and hooves were padded with pillows and the people only ate sushi in winter.

This afternoon I relaxed at a café and wrote the article Coen and Vincent have asked me to write about my trip for their cycling club's newsletter. It is a synopsis of all my adventures since the first week of March, my food poisoning in Portugal, my sinus infection in Spain, my fall at the border of France, my spats with Mike up until Holland, being turned away at the border of Czechoslovakia, the Russian coup happening just as I entered the former East Block and the war in Croatia. I give it to them at dinner and they say they will read it over.


PHOTO 1: Derinkuyu entrance stone
PHOTO 2: meeting and instruction room on second level
PHOTO 3: typical hallway, third level down
PHOTO 4: stairway down into the lower bowels
PHOTO 5: typical dwelling room
PHOTO 6: one of two air shafts at Derinkuyu