When I was stationed in Turkey, I went on a trip to see Özkonak, which is a similar underground city. Living in a country where almost nothing man-made is more than a couple hundred years old, it's wild to see a whole underground city made by human hands thousands of years go. And that these were necessary only because semi-regular invasions were basically a fact of life back then.
adrianmonk · 2h ago
I'm no historian, but looking at a map, Turkey seems geographically prone to getting trampled over and over.
It's basically the hub that connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia together. If someone builds an empire in any of those areas and tries to expand to another one, they're going to want to control the territory that connects them. Even if they don't want Turkey for its own sake, it's a stepping stone.
In other words, if you want to not get invaded, it really helps to be off in a corner that's not on anybody's way from anything to anything. Turkey is the opposite.
kamikazeturtles · 1h ago
I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety, especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
kjkjadksj · 51m ago
Eastern Turkey is remarkably hard country and lowly inhabited. That natural geographical border is probably why that has been a political border frontier of many past and present states for probably 3000+ straight years.
Also this is all a bit white-washed. This underground was in use until the 1920's when the mass killing of Christian Ottomans across Anatolia happened, which is the largely unacknowledged Greek genocide. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.
It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire.
There's something positively evil about playing this up as some kind of whimsical "gee, what happened?" It was genocide.
tldr; This city is 'forgotten' because the Turks slaughtered the Greeks living there and chased off the survivors who would have had knowledge of its expansive underground.
ptspts · 2h ago
This is nowhing new. The city was found in 1963, and it has been a well-known tourist attraction ever since.
areoform · 2h ago
From the article,
Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
The anonymous Turk—no report mentions his name—had found a vast subterranean city, up to 18 stories and 280 feet (76 meters) deep and large enough to house 20,000 people. Who built it, and why? When was it abandoned, and by whom? History and geology provide some answers.
When commenting on HN, it is good form to read the article before commenting.
kjkjadksj · 48m ago
Presumably it was discovered before 1963 by whoever built this man’s basement and walled it off. You have to wonder what other great findings of history were also just shrugged at and passed over without mention.
dizhn · 2h ago
The article is not very good and doesn't mention it but I believe excavations are ongoing on a new site much closer to the city center of Nevşehir. (It's the big municipality the other sites are also part of)
zf00002 · 1h ago
Why is there always a comment on everything from somebody who has to proclaim "its not new"?
It's basically the hub that connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia together. If someone builds an empire in any of those areas and tries to expand to another one, they're going to want to control the territory that connects them. Even if they don't want Turkey for its own sake, it's a stepping stone.
In other words, if you want to not get invaded, it really helps to be off in a corner that's not on anybody's way from anything to anything. Turkey is the opposite.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkey...
Also this is all a bit white-washed. This underground was in use until the 1920's when the mass killing of Christian Ottomans across Anatolia happened, which is the largely unacknowledged Greek genocide. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.
It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
There's something positively evil about playing this up as some kind of whimsical "gee, what happened?" It was genocide.
tldr; This city is 'forgotten' because the Turks slaughtered the Greeks living there and chased off the survivors who would have had knowledge of its expansive underground.