Kaymaklı
Kaymaklı is an underground city in Cappadocia near the village of the same name in the Turkish province of Nevşehir . It is 20 km from the provincial capital Nevşehir .
To date, 36 underground cities have been discovered in Cappadocia, only a small part of which has been prepared for sightseeing. The soft and therefore easy to work tuff rock of the Cappadocian landscape offers the best conditions for such systems. It is assumed that they were partly as early as the third millennium BC. Were created by the Hittites . In Roman times they were expanded by the early Christian communities to offer protection from persecution by the Roman Empire . Some of them were still being used as a refuge from Egyptian troops in 1838. Later, the Turkish residents used the upper, most easily accessible rooms as stables and, above all, as storage rooms, as there is a constant temperature of six to eight degrees Celsius.
Kaymaklı was explored and made accessible to tourism in the early 1960s. The facility consists of eight floors, five of which are illuminated and accessible to visitors. The top floor, the rooms of which were higher and more convenient to enter, mainly contains stables and storage rooms. A complex system of tunnels leads further down, on the next floor there are living rooms, there are some round, meter-high locking stones with which the corridors were blocked, and a church with two apses . A carved tuff block in the middle of the room probably served as an altar. In the neighboring rooms there are burial places in the walls. A granite block 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 stoves.
Since not only the residents of the city consumed oxygen, but also the torches installed for lighting, and smoke extraction from the fire places had to be provided, the entire system is provided with an extremely well thought-out ventilation system, with the larger rooms grouped around the air shafts. Estimates of the number of residents vary between 3,000 and 15,000. In ancient times there is said to have been a connecting tunnel to the similarly large underground city of Derinkuyu nine kilometers away, but it has not yet been proven.
literature
- Peter Daners, Volker Ohl: Cappadocia. Dumont, 1996. ISBN 3-7701-3256-4
Web links
- The underground city Kaymakli
- Kaymakli underground city
- Underground cities in Cappadocia - Myth and Reality (PDF; 587 kB)
Coordinates: 38 ° 27 ′ 56 ″ N , 34 ° 45 ′ 2 ″ E