Free Republic

Alarge number of artifacts belonging to the second and third centuries A.D. were unearthed in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors in southeastern Mardin province’s Midyat district. Midyat, which is almost an open-air museum with its history and culture, offers a magical atmosphere to its visitors with stone houses, inns, mosques, churches and monasteries that are thousands of years old. In the district, a cave was found within the scope of a project started two years ago for cleaning and conservation of the historical streets and houses. After it was determined that...

​In 1963, a Turkish man accidentally uncovered an underground city while making renovations to his home. In the region of ​Cappadocia, the man was knocking down a wall in his basement when he unintentionally came across a secret room, which led to an underground tunnel, which opened up to a ancient hidden city: Derinkuyu.This ancient city was lying 18 stories beneath the Earth's surface. With about 600 entrances, it could house over 20,000 people and the preservation from the photos show the possibility of livestock, food supplies, churches, tombs, communal rooms, schools and stables all hidden in the underground city (Chapel featured in image above). The subterranean...

Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum. The news was reported by Lorenzo d'Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained. This "new discovery" from the pre-classical age which "needs to be continued" in southern...

This image released by the Diputacion Floral de Bizkaia on Friday May 27, 2016, shows a cave drawing. Spanish archaeologists say they have discovered an exceptional set of Paleolithic-era cave drawings that could rank among the best in a country that already boasts some of the world's most important cave art. Chief site archaeologist Diego Garate said Friday that an estimated 70 drawings were found on ledges 300 meters (1,000 feet) underground in the Atxurra cave, Berriatua, in the northern Basque region. He described the site as being in "the Champions' League" of cave art, among the top 10 sites...

New details have been revealed about the massive ancient underground city discovered in Turkey's Central Anatolian province of Nevsehir. The tunnels of the underground city are located under a conical-shaped hill and are wide enough for a car to pass through. Ozcan Cakir, associate professor at the Geophysics Engineering department of the 18 March University and involved in the excavations of the underground city, said they believe the tunnels were used to carry agricultural products. "We believe that people, who were engaged in agriculture, were using the tunnels to carry agricultural products to the city. We also estimate that one...

A monastery hewn from the rock has been found during excavations and cleaning works in an underground city that was discovered in 2014 in the Central Anatolian province of Nevsehir... Excavation and cleaning works have been continuing on an area of 400,000 square meters that includes 11 neighborhoods around Nevsehir Castle, which is situated in the city center and has been declared a third-degree archaeological area. At the beginning of the year, a historic church was discovered in the underground city. The church features frescoes depicting the ascension of Jesus to heaven as well as other important objects for the...

In 1963, an inhabitant of Derinkuyu (in the region of Cappadocia, central Anatolia, Turkey), knocking down a wall of his house cave, discovered amazed that behind it was a mysterious room that he had never seen, and this led him room to another and another and another to it ... By chance he had discovered the underground city of Derinkuyu, whose first level could be excavated by the Hittites around 1400 BC Archaeologists began to explore this fascinating underground city abandoned. It managed to forty meters deep, but is believed to have a fund of up to 85 meters. At...

Last February, archaeologists unearthed a unique rock-carved underground church in Nevsehir, in the central Turkish region of Cappadocia. The church was decorated with never before seen frescoes depicting Jesus’ Ascension, the Final Judgement, Jesus feeding the multitudes, and portraits of saints and prophets.The discovery, made during excavations and cleaning operations in an underground city recently uncovered as part of an urban project in Nevsehir, is located within a castle that might date back to the fifth century. Authorities expect it will make Cappadocia an even more important pilgrimage center for Orthodox Christians. Semih İstanbulluoğlu, the archaeologist who heads the works for...

It's not the first underground city to be discovered in the region; there are some 250 known subterranean dwellings of various sizes hidden within the fantastical landscape. The two biggest are Kaymakli and Derinkuyu; the latter is estimated to have been able to house up to 20,000 people. Both cities have been known for decades. But this new underground town, hiding beneath a centuries-old castle on a hilltop right in NevÅŸehir, just might be the biggest. One early estimate by geophysicists put its area at nearly five million square feet and its depth at 371 feet. If those estimates are...

The rediscovery of an ancient underground city in Turkey a few years ago was an exciting find—the very kind of exciting find that the internet eats up. The 5,000-year-old cave villa, found in the city of Nevşehir, is fairly huge, with approximately 3.5 miles of tunnels, and dozens of rooms making up churches, tombs, and other safe spaces. In comments to National Geographic, Nevşehir Mayor Hasan Ünver noted that there was a bit of a paper trail that went back hundreds of years, but not one that implied that there was an entire city in the area. "We found documents...

One of the greatest engineering achievements of ancient times is a water tunnel, 1,036 meters (4,000 feet) long, excavated through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos in the sixth century B.C. It was dug through solid limestone by two separate teams advancing in a straight line from both ends, using only picks, hammers, and chisels. This was a prodigious feat of manual labor. The intellectual feat of determining the direction of tunneling was equally impressive. How did they do this? No one knows for sure, because no written records exist. When the tunnel was dug, the Greeks had...

Archeologists have found an ancient underground town in Kyparissia in Greece during a local construction work. According to Katerina Nikolas, a columnist for helium.com, recently some local road works were being carried out near a swimming pool in the city and something unusual caused them to stop their work immediately. It appeared that an ancient underground town had been discovered on the site, which archeologists are now excavating. Interestingly some parts of the ancient town are higher than the depths of the swimming pool nearby, meaning that when the land was purchased and the swimming pool built, the owner must...

Seemingly by coincidence I stumbled upon a book entitled Field Guide to Mysterious Places of Eastern North America by Salvatore M. Trento, an Oxford grad. In his book he gives information on 3 underground tunnels outside of Ellenville, NY. He also mentions the presence of 20 circular pits outside of Pine Bush... Unlike the pits, there is no supported explanation as of yet for the tunnels. The author speculates that they were carved by Dutch miners in search of a mineral vein. No records exist of the tunnels and no local historians know how they came to be... The main...