Greg A. Brown

BLDGBLOG just posted a fascinating entry on the underground metropolis of Derinkuyu, and I had best start by quoting the same source as the post, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us:

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people – and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.

The rest of the post tries to dissect why this seems so cool to so many people, touching on the more modern sprawling subterranean constructions under many current cities, as well as insinuations of underground cities in Foucault’s Pendulum (a point that we’ll be getting back to later). (more…)