The entrance is unremarkable: a doorway in a low building on an ordinary street, with a ticket desk and a handrail. Then the floor tilts, the ceiling comes down to meet you, and about a minute later you are bent forward at the waist shuffling down a sloping tunnel barely wider than your shoulders, with a queue of people behind you and no way to turn around.
That is the part to decide about before you buy a ticket, so let us deal with it first.
The decision in one word
Claustrophobia.
These passages are narrow and low on purpose. A tunnel you have to stoop through is a tunnel an armed man cannot run down, and that was the point. So the discomfort is not an accident of age or erosion. It is the architecture working exactly as designed, all these centuries later, on you.
The route is one-way for much of its length, the ceiling in the connecting passages is well below standing height, and there is no quick exit from the middle. Some people find it thrilling. A meaningful number get partway down and need to come back up, which is awkward against the flow of a group.
If you already know that small spaces are a problem for you, believe yourself. The rest of Cappadocia is above ground and there is no shame in sitting this one out.
Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı
Most visitors do not really choose, since whichever one their tour includes is the one they see, and both are on the southern tour route. But if you are choosing:
| Derinkuyu | Kaymaklı | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Deep and vertical: a long descent through level after level | Wider and lower-slung: more horizontal movement across levels |
| The descent | Steeper, more stairs, a stronger sense of going down | Long sloping passages rather than dramatic drops |
| Signature feature | An enormous vertical shaft running the full depth, used for ventilation and as a well | A denser warren; more visible domestic and production spaces |
| Choose it if | You want the more dramatic, deeper experience | You want the shorter, slightly less oppressive version |
Neither is the "real" one and neither is a copy. They are two settlements of the same kind, a short distance apart, connected, according to local accounts repeated widely, by tunnels running between them.
Doing both is redundant unless you are genuinely interested. One is plenty.
They were not cities
The English word does more harm than any other single thing in the way these places are presented.
Nobody lived down here permanently. There is no daylight, no arable land and no reason to. What these complexes were is refuges: spaces a whole community could disappear into, with its animals and its food, and seal behind it, for as long as a raiding army stayed in the area.
Read them that way and every feature snaps into focus:
- The stone doors. Great circular slabs like millstones, set on edge in carved recesses beside the passage, rolled across to block it. They can only be moved from the inside. That is a defensive design decision with no other possible purpose.
- The ventilation shafts. Vertical wells cut from the surface to the lowest levels, with smaller ducts branching off. They kept the air breathable, and the main shaft doubled as a water source reached from below, so nobody up top could poison or cut it.
- The stables near the top. Livestock went in first, closest to the surface. Their body heat rose through the complex, which is a useful side effect of a practical decision.
- The kitchens and presses. Cooking spaces with ceilings still blackened by soot, rock-cut storage jars, and basins for pressing grapes and oil. A refuge that has to hold out needs to produce, not just store.
- The chapels, deep down. Cut low in the complex, including cruciform chapels, which tells you who was hiding, and roughly when.
Who dug them, honestly
Here is where most articles pick a side and state it flatly. We are not going to, because the evidence does not support it.
The early phases are genuinely disputed. Some accounts credit the Hittites, pushing the origin back towards 1600 BC; others credit the Phrygians in the eighth or seventh century BC; others simply say early inhabitants working the soft volcanic rock with hand tools. There is no consensus, and anyone who tells you flatly which it was is repeating a guide script.
What is well supported is the later phase. Christian communities in the Byzantine period expanded these complexes substantially, adding the chapels and using the lower levels as refuges during Persian and Arab incursions. Pottery, tool marks and construction sequencing point to many phases of work over a long period rather than one campaign. This is centuries of a community digging a bit more, generation by generation, because the soft tuff makes that possible with hand tools.
Treat the capacity figures the same way. You will hear that Derinkuyu could hold twenty thousand people. It is a commonly cited estimate, not a measurement, and the depth and level counts vary between sources too. The scale is genuinely astonishing without anyone rounding up.
The one found under a housing project
In 2013 and 2014, demolition work for an urban redevelopment scheme in central Nevşehir opened into tunnels, and the excavation that followed revealed another complex on a scale that startled everyone involved: living spaces, kitchens, wine and oil production, chapels, connected passages running for kilometres.
Excavators and the Turkish press have described it as potentially the largest yet found in the region. Take the superlatives as the press-release claims they are; the site is still being excavated and its full extent is not established. But it is a good reminder that this landscape is not finished giving things up, and that in Cappadocia the ground under an ordinary street is not necessarily solid.
Practical, without the numbers
Wear shoes with grip. The passages are worn smooth by a very long time and a very large number of feet, and the slopes are slippery.
Go early or late in the day. These sites take tour groups in waves, and a narrow one-way passage with a group coming through is the worst version of the visit.
Do not carry a big bag. You will be scraping it along a wall for twenty minutes.
Take a layer. It is cool down there in every season, which is a relief in August and a surprise in April.
Do not take small children down unless you know they will be fine with dark and enclosed spaces. There is no way to shorten the route once you are committed.
And when you come back up, look at the street differently. Somewhere under the flat ordinary ground of half the villages around here, there is more of this.