Ancient secrets unearthed in vast Turkish cave city

Through a basement door in southeastern Türkiye lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country's largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century B.C.

Archaeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city "almost by chance" after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020.

Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120 meters of tunnel carved out of the rock. But that is only a fraction of the site's estimated 900,000-square-meter area, which would make it the largest underground city in Türkiye's southern Anatolia region.

"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.

The art historian traces the city's ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC.

At its height in the seventh century B.C., the empire stretched from The Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west.

Referred to as Matiate in that period, the city's original entrance required people to bend in half and squeeze themselves into a circular opening. It was this entrance that first gave the Midyat municipality an inkling of its subterranean counterpart's existence.

"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."

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