Who Built the Underground Cities of Cappadocia, and Why?

A city that remembers more than one people

It is tempting to imagine a single night when the work began. A ruler orders the ground opened. Engineers draw a plan. Thousands of workers descend with tools. The first tunnel is finished, then another, until a subterranean metropolis takes shape according to a hidden master design.

The real history of Cappadocia may be stranger because it is less tidy.

A passage made for one purpose can become a storage room two centuries later. A family shelter can be connected to a larger system. A space cut long before an invading army arrives can be enlarged under pressure. A church might be installed in what was once an entirely different kind of room.

This is why asking "Who built the underground cities?" may be the wrong singular question. The archaeological task is to identify different acts of excavation, occupation, alteration and abandonment. [S007; S014]

A landscape that invited excavation

Cappadocia's dramatic rock formations owe much to volcanic history and later erosion. In parts of the region, comparatively workable tuff and ignimbrite made rock-cut structures practical. The ground could form the walls, floors and roofs of a building. The landscape therefore offered an architectural option rare in places where harder stone or unstable deposits made such work dangerous. [S009; S010]

Geology is not destiny. The presence of carvable rock cannot explain why one village needed a cellar, another a monastery and another a refuge large enough to connect many households. But it helps explain why the same region accumulated so many examples of rock-cut space.

The underground cities were part of a wider landscape of aboveground settlements, caves, religious architecture, routes and agriculture. For the people who used them, descending under the earth did not necessarily mean leaving their community behind. It could mean moving into another part of it.

The Hittite question

One of the most repeated claims says that the Hittites built Derinkuyu more than three thousand years ago. Another frequently names the Phrygians. Still others attribute the entire site to early Christians.

Those statements do not have identical evidentiary status. The central Anatolian region was inhabited by numerous cultures across long periods, and a 2020 academic chapter by Clelia Mora, Maria Elena Balza, Roberto Bixio and Andrea De Pascale investigates Cappadocia's underground landscape in connection with Neo-Hittite evidence. Its existence alone refutes the idea that archaeologists have no reason to examine pre-Byzantine contexts. But "Neo-Hittite evidence in the region" is not automatically "an inscription identifying the builder of Derinkuyu's lowest level." [S007]

Official Turkish heritage pages themselves can emphasize different slices of the story. A ministry visitor description associates underground-city construction with the spread of Christianity and dates a defensive form to around the ninth or tenth centuries. Other museum descriptions acknowledge ancient settlement in the area and emphasize Christian refuge and adaptation. These public summaries are useful but should not be treated as an archaeological proof that all excavations belong to precisely one century. [S008; S012; S013]

The most reasonable starting picture is a long history of reuse and possible earlier excavation, with the Byzantine Christian period an especially visible phase. The earliest cuts require specific evidence, not an attractive ancient name placed over the entire labyrinth.

What would prove an earlier phase?

Suppose researchers find pottery in a chamber. Its style can suggest a period of use or deposition. But a cup brought into a room does not necessarily date the day the room was carved.

Suppose researchers identify a tool mark. It may offer clues about techniques, but an identical-looking mark can be made by people separated in time, or altered by later work. Suppose a corridor resembles a defensive passage from a well-dated site. That resemblance invites comparison but is weaker than stratified finds or a secure inscription.

A stronger case would join several lines of evidence: undisturbed deposits in a sealed chamber; objects from a narrow, independently dated context; inscriptions or occupation layers; architectural sequences showing one cut interrupts another; documented excavations with reliable provenience. [S007; S009]

Rock itself is older than every human who worked it. Dating the volcanic formation tells us when the material was deposited, not when a person hollowed it out. This is a common source of confusion in online discussions: ancient geological age is mistaken for ancient human construction age.

The ancient Greek writer who saw underground homes

There is one particularly useful document. In Book Four of the Anabasis, Xenophon describes underground houses with entrances resembling wells and space for people, animals and stores. This is an authentic ancient text. Its details are vivid: ladders, animals, provisions and a life organized below ground. [S011]

But the specific passage describes villages in Armenia, not an authenticated visit to Derinkuyu. Modern summaries sometimes turn it into direct eyewitness confirmation that Xenophon saw Cappadocia's famous underground city. The text does not support that leap.

What it does establish is more historically valuable: forms of underground living existed in the wider region in antiquity. Xenophon gives us a window into a type of architecture and household economy. He does not hand us Derinkuyu's construction permit.

The same principle applies to mythic accounts of shelters from catastrophe. Such texts deserve careful study as traditions, but a story about a refuge is not a site-specific excavation report.

The Christian centuries in the landscape

The Byzantine periods offer much more visible context for Cappadocia's rock-cut spaces. Churches and monasteries were carved into the local terrain; documented examples contain identifiable forms of Christian religious practice. A Metropolitan Museum chronology places a flourishing of monumental rock-cut architecture in Cappadocia from the early sixth century onward. [S020]

This does not mean every subterranean room began as a church. It tells us that people of these centuries knew how to make sophisticated architectural environments by removing stone, and that religious and domestic use of cut rock was established.

Warfare and political instability also offer a plausible reason for refuges. Protection from raids could explain narrow approaches, internal stone barriers and concealed connections. But the phrase "built during invasion" can hide a centuries-long sequence of different conflicts. The architecture may have been constructed or expanded in response to repeated pressures rather than one identifiable attack.

Why refuge is a system, not a hole

Kaymaklı provides a useful comparison. Its official museum description identifies storage rooms, wine facilities, kitchen spaces, water wells, ventilation and barriers that close from the inside. Four floors are open to visitors in the modern presentation. The combination indicates communal sheltering and provisioning rather than a collection of disconnected caves. [S012]

In a genuine refuge, time becomes as dangerous as the threat outside. Even if an attacker cannot pass a rolling door, the inhabitants need air and supplies. Food storage near a transport route can matter as much as a defensive choke point. An underground community must manage smoke, sanitation and the movement of people in cramped spaces. A shaft that offers air or water might also create a vulnerability at the surface.

When a television reconstruction presents the whole settlement as permanently self-sufficient, ask how the population, storage, ventilation and occupancy duration were calculated. The site demonstrates sophisticated practical adaptation. Its carrying capacity under every conceivable scenario is not fully measured.

The problem with one founding date

Imagine you discover a medieval church in a cave, a much older piece of pottery nearby and a nineteenth-century repair to a stair. Which date belongs to the city?

Each dates a different event. The church has an architectural period. The pottery has a deposition history that must be investigated. The repair has its own place in the sequence. A simple online timeline may flatten those different events into an alleged founding year.

This is a reason to favor multiphase models. The 2020 Cappadocia study situates underground sites within broader ancient Near Eastern archaeology, while modern engineering and fieldwork investigate geology and architecture. Together they suggest a research agenda, not one spectacular discovery that settles everything. [S007; S009; S010]

A multiphase explanation is not automatically correct for every tunnel, and it remains possible that future securely dated finds will establish much earlier foundations at particular sites. Openness means retaining that possibility while explaining what evidence would change the chronology.

Why people went underground

At least four motives deserve discussion. First, defense: choke points and blocking stones can slow an intrusion. Second, storage and production: consistent subterranean temperatures can be useful for goods and food. Third, climate and terrain: carved rooms offer shelter in a harsh environment. Fourth, religion and community: chapels, schools and common rooms signal social organization.

These motives can overlap. A family might use one room routinely and retreat deeper when threatened. Different generations may assign different purposes to the same chamber.

The strongest historical narrative does not ask us to choose a single cause for every site. It asks which functions are supported by which traces.

A conversation that has not ended

The question of Derinkuyu's first builders is not solved by repeating "Hittite," "Phrygian," or "Byzantine" with increasing confidence. Each proposal needs carefully located evidence. The exact history of excavation probably includes more than one stage, though the timing and shape of those stages remain subjects for investigation.

That ambiguity is not a license to fill every gap with a preferred civilization. It is an invitation to design better research.

Who cut the earliest room? Did they intend a refuge from the beginning? How were chambers linked? Why do some routes appear planned while others reflect alteration? Which deposits can be securely dated without confusing occupation with construction?

The next time someone says that a lost people must have built Cappadocia's hidden cities, there is a useful response that does not end the conversation: Which part of the underground landscape are we dating, and how would we demonstrate it?

The past is not less extraordinary when its questions are precise. It becomes possible to explore it further.