A vast underground city, maybe the biggest in the nation, can be accessed through a basement entrance in southeast Turkey. According to one historian, the city was founded in the ninth century before the year 1000.
After a massive cavern of caves was discovered in 2020 during the excavation of home cellars in Midyat, close to the Syrian border, archaeologists “almost by chance” discovered the city-under-a-city.
More than fifty underground chambers have already been excavated by workers, and they are all connected by a 120-meter (131-yard) tube that was hewn out of the rock.
However, that only makes up a small portion of the site’s estimated 900,000 square meters, making it the biggest underground metropolis in the southern Anatolia region of Turkey.
“Maybe even in the world,” said Midyat conservation director Mervan Yavuz who oversaw the excavation.
“To protect themselves from the climate, enemies, predators and diseases, people took refuge in these caves which they turned into an actual city,” Yavuz added.
According to the art historian, King Ashurnasirpal II, who governed the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC, is credited with founding the city.
The empire spanned from the Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west at its height in the seventh century BC.
The city’s ancient entrance, known as Matiate at the time, forced visitors to bend down and fit themselves into a circular aperture.
The Midyat municipality first became aware of the existence of its underground counterpart through this entry.
“We actually suspected that it existed,” Yavuz recounted as he walked through the cave’s gloom.
“In the 1970s, the ground collapsed and a construction machine fell down. But at the time we didn’t try to find out more, we just strengthened and closed up the hole.”
