Mysterious Underground City Found In Man’s Basement

From Atlas Obscura, April 7:

How a renovation project in Turkey led to the discovery of a lifetime—a lost city that once housed 20,000 people. 

For perhaps thousands of years, local Cappadocians retreated underground when enemies approached. Their subterranean city was rediscovered by accident. (Credit: Yasir999, CC BY-SA 4.0)

• In 1963, a man knocked down a wall in his basement and discovered a mysterious underground city.
• The subterranean city is up to 18 stories and 280 feet deep in places and probably thousands of years old.
• The Derinkuyu Underground City is the largest of its kind: It could house 20,000 people.

We live cheek by jowl with undiscovered worlds. Sometimes the barriers that separate us are thick, sometimes they’re thin, and sometimes they’re breached. That’s when a wardrobe turns into a portal to Narnia, a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland, and a Raquel Welch poster is all that separates a prison cell from the tunnel to freedom.

A fateful swing of the hammer

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....

....MUCH MORE

 

I had a room like that once, though it was more grotto than accommodations for 20,000 of my closest friends it was nice.