When I was stationed in Turkey, I went on a trip to see Özkonak, which is a similar underground city. Living in a country where almost nothing man-made is more than a couple hundred years old, it's wild to see a whole underground city made by human hands thousands of years go. And that these were necessary only because semi-regular invasions were basically a fact of life back then.
I'm no historian, but looking at a map, Turkey seems geographically prone to getting trampled over and over.
It's basically the hub that connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia together. If someone builds an empire in any of those areas and tries to expand to another one, they're going to want to control the territory that connects them. Even if they don't want Turkey for its own sake, it's a stepping stone.
In other words, if you want to not get invaded, it really helps to be off in a corner that's not on anybody's way from anything to anything. Turkey is the opposite.
I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety, especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
My father, a Turk, has a couple of close Armenian friends from Arapkir, a county of Malatya, from his childhood right after WWII. Going back 30-40 years before that period, Armenians were the majority ethnic population in many counties of eastern Turkish cities. Not sure about Persians, but having an Armenian connection in a big chunk of your DNA if you're from the area shouldn't be that surprising.
Fun fact. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, has Malatya and Arabkir districts.
Eastern Turkey is remarkably hard country and lowly inhabited. That natural geographical border is probably why that has been a political border frontier of many past and present states for probably 3000+ straight years.
Any mention of lost archaeology these days reminds me of the LiDAR surveys being down in Mexico and South America that are finding not just lost cities, but entire lost metropolitan areas (with suburbs, trade routes in between, etc.). It makes me wonder if there are analogues in places like West and Central Africa. A YouTube video I'd watched about African architecture posited that there is probably much to be discovered, as the quality of vernacular housing doesn't seem to match the pride in craftsmanship of other artifacts. Turkey is, historically, one of the most consistently populated places on the planet, going back into antiquity, so if large structures there (even purposely hidden ones) can go lost for literal millennia, how lucky would one have to be to stumble upon one in more sparsely-populated regions?
All Cappadocia area is like a visit to another planet. Ihlara valley, Zelve open air museum, Uchisar castle, hot air balloons, cave systems. Very strange place.
Of course in their list of fictional gateways, they get the Shawshank Redemption example wrong: it was Rita Hayworth, not Raquel Welch. (I found a similar aggravating error recently in an (older) article on boingboing which erroneously credited the song Route 66 to Chuck Berry.
Also this is all a bit white-washed. This underground was in use until the 1920's when the mass killing of Christian Ottomans across Anatolia happened, which is the largely unacknowledged Greek genocide. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.
It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire.
There's something positively evil about playing this up as some kind of whimsical "gee, what happened?" It was genocide.
tldr; This city is 'forgotten' because the Turks slaughtered the Greeks living there and chased off the survivors who would have had knowledge of its expansive underground.
When I was stationed in Turkey, I went on a trip to see Özkonak, which is a similar underground city. Living in a country where almost nothing man-made is more than a couple hundred years old, it's wild to see a whole underground city made by human hands thousands of years go. And that these were necessary only because semi-regular invasions were basically a fact of life back then.
I'm no historian, but looking at a map, Turkey seems geographically prone to getting trampled over and over.
It's basically the hub that connects Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia together. If someone builds an empire in any of those areas and tries to expand to another one, they're going to want to control the territory that connects them. Even if they don't want Turkey for its own sake, it's a stepping stone.
In other words, if you want to not get invaded, it really helps to be off in a corner that's not on anybody's way from anything to anything. Turkey is the opposite.
I don't know if that is necessarily the case. I'm from eastern Turkey and my DNA results showed mostly Iranian and Armenian ethnicity. I'd assume, a place that was constantly trampled would have a little more variety, especially considering the last time the Persian or Armenian empires controlled the city I'm from (Malatya) was thousands of years ago.
It's valuable real estate but not so easy to conquer. Probably because of the mountains. When the Arab's were on a role, they couldn't get too far into Turkey, same with Tamerlane, as well as many other invaders throughout history.
My father, a Turk, has a couple of close Armenian friends from Arapkir, a county of Malatya, from his childhood right after WWII. Going back 30-40 years before that period, Armenians were the majority ethnic population in many counties of eastern Turkish cities. Not sure about Persians, but having an Armenian connection in a big chunk of your DNA if you're from the area shouldn't be that surprising.
Fun fact. Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, has Malatya and Arabkir districts.
edit: typo
Eastern Turkey is remarkably hard country and lowly inhabited. That natural geographical border is probably why that has been a political border frontier of many past and present states for probably 3000+ straight years.
Any mention of lost archaeology these days reminds me of the LiDAR surveys being down in Mexico and South America that are finding not just lost cities, but entire lost metropolitan areas (with suburbs, trade routes in between, etc.). It makes me wonder if there are analogues in places like West and Central Africa. A YouTube video I'd watched about African architecture posited that there is probably much to be discovered, as the quality of vernacular housing doesn't seem to match the pride in craftsmanship of other artifacts. Turkey is, historically, one of the most consistently populated places on the planet, going back into antiquity, so if large structures there (even purposely hidden ones) can go lost for literal millennia, how lucky would one have to be to stumble upon one in more sparsely-populated regions?
Underground cities are fascinating. A similar one is Naours, with it's 300 rooms https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cite-souterraine-de-naou...
All Cappadocia area is like a visit to another planet. Ihlara valley, Zelve open air museum, Uchisar castle, hot air balloons, cave systems. Very strange place.
Of course in their list of fictional gateways, they get the Shawshank Redemption example wrong: it was Rita Hayworth, not Raquel Welch. (I found a similar aggravating error recently in an (older) article on boingboing which erroneously credited the song Route 66 to Chuck Berry.
The posters changed over the years as he was digging the tunnel - the final one was indeed a poster of Raquel Welch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyN63zVPQjk&t=209s
fwiw, this article is more serious and concise for those of us who dont like this sort of long-winded stylistic prose.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkey...
Also this is all a bit white-washed. This underground was in use until the 1920's when the mass killing of Christian Ottomans across Anatolia happened, which is the largely unacknowledged Greek genocide. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.
It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
There's something positively evil about playing this up as some kind of whimsical "gee, what happened?" It was genocide.
tldr; This city is 'forgotten' because the Turks slaughtered the Greeks living there and chased off the survivors who would have had knowledge of its expansive underground.