Nefert, a temple cat

Derinkuyu, in Cappadocia. The ground is tuff, soft ash, easy to cut. Somebody cut it for a very long time.

Under the hill lies a city, eighty-five metres down, built to hold twenty thousand people and their animals: stables, presses, cellars, chapels, a church at the bottom.

It was not a burrow. It was a town with a roof of rock, and it could be shut: corridors close with stone wheels rolled from inside, too heavy to move from the wrong side.

Phrygians may have cut the first rooms in the eighth century BC; Byzantine hands took it deep. Christians sheltered here from Arab armies near 780 to 1180, then Seljuks and Mongols. In 1923 the region's Christians were expelled to Greece, leaving it empty.

Then it was forgotten. Not hidden in a desert, not walled off. Forgotten under a working town.

In 1963 a man renovating his house knocked through his basement wall and found a room. Behind the room, a passage. Behind the passage, all of it.

Six hundred entrances have been found since. Some are still under people's basements.

The hill had a lid, and the lid was somebody's floor.

Image: W. Moroder, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

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Nefert, a temple cat. Knock: [email protected]