Kaymaklı Underground City

Kaymakli is an underground city in Cappadocia in the same village in the Turkish province of Nevsehir. It is 20 km from the provincial capital of Nevsehir.

In Cappadocia 36 underground cities have been discovered to date, of which only a small part is prepared for visits. The soft and thus easy to work tuff of the Cappadocian landscape offers the best conditions for such systems. It is believed that they were partly created already in the third millennium BC by the Hittites. In Roman times, it has developed from the early Christian communities, to provide protection from persecution by the Roman Empire. They were used in part or in 1838 as a refuge from the Egyptian troops. Later, the Turkish inhabitants used the upper, most accessible rooms as stables and especially as storage spaces where there is a constant temperature of between six and eight degrees Celsius.

Kaymaklı was investigated in the early sixties of the last century and made available to tourism. The system consists of eight levels, five of which illuminated and are accessible to visitors. The top floor, whose rooms were higher and more comfortable to commit, mainly contains stables and storerooms. A complex system of tunnels leading further down, at the next floor there is a living room, you will find some round, enormous closure stones with which the passages were blocked, and a church with two apses. A skulpierter Tuffblock in the middle of the room probably had the function of an altar. In the adjacent rooms grave Insert embedded in the walls. A block of granite in relief in the third basement was probably used as a melting pot for copper. The next two floors contain wine presses, depots with hollows for clay pots in which food was stored, and a large communal kitchen with stove places.

Since not only the inhabitants of the town of oxygen consumed, but also attached to lighting torches, and had to be taken care of also for smoke from the fireplaces, the entire facility is equipped with an extremely well thought out ventilation system, with the larger rooms are grouped around the air vents. Estimates of the number of residents vary 3000-15000. It should have in ancient times a tunnel connection to the nine kilometers away, similar to large underground city of Derinkuyu exists, but he could not yet be detected.