Lost Civilizations: The Mystery of Derinkuyu

Since the 1960's, archaeologists have been fascinated by the mysterious underground city of
Derinkuyu in Cappadocia, Turkey. Seemingly at least 3000 years old, the complex system of tunnels, resevoirs, storehouses, and gates has puzzled historians and archaeologists alike regarding its original inhabitants. Welcome back to The Lore Lodge...

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[mikepatton]

What if they built Derenkuyu underground simply for the thermal stability. Being underground would be about the most temperature stable environments achievable at the time. They could stay warm during the winter and escape the heat in the summer. The residents in Coober Pedy Australia live underground for the same reason.

[daltonvickery]

Man, imagine just doing some repairs on your house and you just... stumble across a whole ass city

[jacopoarmini]

I think there's a thing everyone is not considering when talking about underground cities: the heat. In very hot places like turkey people might exploit the softness of the ground to avoid the scorching sun. I know that people did that in southern Italy, so why not turkey.

[binaryghosts]

isn't finding some weird underground city in your house like the plots of several Lovecraft stories?

[MisterPingy]

They can't siege your city if they can't find your city bro, that's why underground instead of walls. You can go up a hill and can clearly see a walled city with 20k people. You go up a hill and an underground city of 20k might look like a small farming community of a few hundred. Farmers don't have gold, not even worth bothering with.

[armor_of_god]

Maybe the upper city was a "decoy". It didn't have walls, so to outsiders it wouldn't look as if it were that important. I could see many benefits to having the bulk of your population living safely underground, but having something on top to keep outsiders from looking too close.
Admittedly I don't know that much about the region, but I can imagine not everyone would use the same strategy for survival.
Oh, the city closet to us got raided even with their walls? Let's make ourselves look unattractive to raiders.

Edit: I'd also be interested to see where the stone that was taken out of the underground city ended up. They had to do a LOT of digging, so would they repurpose the stone? Would it be sold to other people to use? Would it just have been carted away?
So many questions

[shakukon-to]

I think it would be funny that all these unexplained things for why they were built would have the reasoning of “it was a cool idea and we got people to also think it was cool”. Like the guy who initially came up with the idea with Derinkuyu was like “yup, this would be sick” and everyone he showed the idea to was also like “yup, this is sick we need to get on this”.

[bboops]

Temperature Control is the most likely explanation. It would have been cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. People could have been able to easily stay down there to avoid heat stroke. They probably had several access points so in the event of a siege the sick, elderly, and the young would have a safe place to stay. I wouldn't be surprised if this was basically the early version of the community center. People live above ground, but have a place to go when it is too hot or too cold.

[arrye]

As a studying anthropologist, think it's incredibly important to look at what others have done with similar tools/technology or worse (for lack of better word) as a reference for almost anything. Look at Teotihuacan, built up but also somewhat down (it has been excavated to find tunnels under the pyramids) with wood and stone, in very quick time. Speaking purely on human ingenuity and will, I believe it's incredibly possible for this city to have been built thousands of years ago with tools that, in our modern eyes, may be seen as inadequate. Also look at the tunnels of Vietnamese freedom fighters, made to be miles long WITH the limitations of building much of them only a certain width so they would not be collapsed by overhead tanks. Where there's a will, there's a way.

As someone fascinated with digging and tunnels, there's also many reasons as to why a civilization would choose to build underground that weren't really explored in the video, also listed by others in the comments.

1) Stable temperature. Anatolia certainly isn't the most inhospitable of climates, but it isn't the most mild either. Building underground allows for a very stable temperature that would be good for people and storing of various foods and goods. Houston actually has some underground areas (despite the flooding) with malls and the like so people don't have to deal with the oppressive humid heat from above.

2) Appearance. Sure, it's possible the group that founded the site could have built walls, but you know who else could have? Sparta. But they didn't, and it saved them at least once from invasion as the invading leader (cannot recall the name right now) did not believe that unwalled town could be the great city of Sparta and moved along. And again, look at the Vietnamese tunnels, which connected to various small villages where you'd never expect such an intricate and populated system to be. It is no bad thing to appear unassuming in the eyes of potential invaders.

3) More use for surface lands. Less land being used for people and storage above means more possibly arable land above, and as stated in the video, wouldn't require nearly the amount of stone and the like to build up. Then also the soil and stone that have been removed could be used for other purposes.

4) Safety from non-humans, including possible religious/spiritual threats or other beliefs. I imagine it's quite easier to keep you and your livestock safe from wolves and the like when they're underground. I know of some cultures that believe(d) breathing in the night air unfiltered was not good for you, and perhaps some beliefs akin to that could tie into the affinity for underground dwellings. I'm thinking of other folklore that could be made possibly less of a threat by building underground—such as fae, where you wouldn't have to worry about accidentally building in or traversing one of their paths if you're mostly underground. I'd also probably feel safer from a bigfoot that could be stalking nearby forests. Obv probably not what they believed in, but just examples on how building underground could help with or totally circumvent folklore threats.

5) Perhaps just a natural affinity for it. Humans found refuge in caves all over the world for thousands of years before we really started building our own domains. Why couldn't or shouldn't we return to this natural inclination with all its benefits?

It is important to remember that just because we don't do it today doesn't mean there wasn't reason to it back then, or even could still be beneficial today. All it takes is some innovation.

[XanderKaine]

My theory a bunch of minecraft players got trapped in the past and just did what minecrafters do dig down

[ajrk]

In Australia there are places where they build underground to avoid the heat of the sun. If the sediment of the region was particularly well suited to the task it doesn't surprise me that a couple millennia of constant habitation could result in some rather extensive tunnel works. It bears mentioning that there are many ancient cities with subterranean dwelling as well as houses carved out from caves.

[SheaLeona]

Just recently found this channel, and at first I wasn’t sure I liked it. Now I can’t stop watching. You do such a fantastic job researching. I learn new things every time I watch a video, even on subjects I’ve read about or listened to many other people talk about. Thank you!!

[Etthompson]

This channel is criminally small, content this good and this interesting deserves so much more traffic. You have my subscription sir, and once I finish binging your backlog, I look forward to what you do next.
Ona side note for your 411 series, you might want to check out some of the stories from the PCT. I did the trail in 2022, and stuff out there is real, real weird, particularly in California.

[Mvllon]

Would love to see a follow up if these cave systems were affected by the earthquakes in Anatolia over the past week.

[waterloo]

If you build walls, they will be noticeable to any scouts moving before an army. The benefits of living and building underground is that your city is less noticeable. It looks small and worthless, so most armies in that time probably wouldn’t bother laying siege and just bypass these underground/hidden cities

[LG-hmtv]

More like this please! Enjoyed it so much. I love obscure history.

[Sicarii]

When you mentioned that agriculture first approach you might have been on to something. If you don't have much arable land, building underground might be a way to maximise what little land you have. I don't know the region, nor what it was like that long ago but it seems like a valid hypotheses to me.

[benjaminmatheny]

The craziest thing about how little the Hittites are known is just how big a deal they were in their time. They were one of the Major Superpowers of the West at the Time. They also control like 90% of the available Tin mines...in a time called the bronze age... of which Tin is a required element.
For people talking about sieges, at the time all you could really do was sit around outside and starve them out. Bow and Arrow is the height of artillery for the time. The major war tech is War-chariots.

[georgegibson]

The hardest city to attack is the one you didn't know existed

[Jack-qehv]

Could the underground part of the city simply have been built to hide from a siege instead of defending against one? If it was made in a time period which walls were present then the creators would have known about the idea, but perhaps they didn’t want to risk losing their people and resources so instead of building something noticeable which could be destroyed their defense was to hide, a whole city underground in a time period which called for walls to defend from raids and sieges could likely go unnoticed if hidden well