Kaymakli Underground City – Taking a Trip Four Floors Down and Many Years in the Past

Crawling through one of the unmarked tunnels.

About twenty minutes from the Cappadocia central town of Neveshir, Turkey lies a mammoth underground city called Kaymakli. Stables, kitchens, storage, churches, a winery, cemeteries and houses are just some of the things we found in the few hours we spent underground at Kaymakli. The former inhabits of these caves used them for everything but most importantly they were used to hide from would be invaders. The Cappadocia region of Turkey is literally filled with these underground cities, I read one article that stated there’s an underground city for every above ground city. Only four of these cities have been made available for tourists to visit. We heard that many locals still use underground cities, or what’s left of them, for current storage. 

Small doorways

Fifteen Turkish Lira ($8.50 USD) will get you into the underground city, if you’d like you can pick-up a guide onsite for approximately 40 Turkish Lira but we recommend reading up ahead of time and going in on your own. Going in alone and not part of an organized tour will give you the most amount of time to explore the city and it’s features. We would recommend bringing at least one torch, preferably a head torch for your visit. Long pants and a long-sleeve shirt are also a good idea as you could be crawling on the ground for a bit. 

Just happy to be in a room we can stand-up in.

It took many hundreds of years for the Kaymakli caves to be carved out and it’s hard to say how many people actually inhabited the underground city during it’s heyday but it’s believed the inhabitants were not too impoverished as there is quite a substantial area for storage of food and other goods.  While we were visiting it was a cold-cold day with snow on the ground so I can only imagine the city inhabitants were thankful for these caves in the wintertime to escape the cold and the summertime to escape the heat.

A very deep ventilation shaft. We couldn't see the bottom of it.

Once in the caves you can take a suggested path by following red arrow signs to go in and down and blue arrow signs to go up and out. All the areas marked with arrow signs are well lit with easy to follow passageways. Claustrophobics should beware though as some of the lit passages get pretty narrow and short.  We did our best to follow the red and blue arrows but also took any chance we could to explore other passageways that were not lit. Most of these passages involved turning on our torches and crawling through very small tunnels to rooms that looked like old storage areas. In one case we couldn’t go any farther down a tunnel as it got too small to turn around and we didn’t feel like crawling backwards. At one point we shut off our lights and sat quiet in the pitch black, it’s an eerie feeling to be in a place so dark and quiet. We could hear each other breathing but couldn’t see our hands in front of our own face. Definitely not for the people who are scared of the dark or of confined spaces.

One of the larger rooms on the path through the city.

Getting to Kaymakli
There are many tours that take you into this underground city but we’d recommend doing it on your own if you have some free time and don’t mind exploring a bit. From Goreme you can take a minibus to the minibus stop in Nevesihir at a cost of two Turkish Lira ($1.15 USD).  At the minibus stop catch a van to Kaymakli, the above ground city is also called Kaymakli, at a cost of three Turkish Lira ($1.75 USD). Tell the driver to Kaymakli that you want to get off at the underground city. The van will drop you at the exact right place. When finished just walk back to the main road and wait for the van that reads Kaymakli/Nevesihir and just reverse the process. You shouldn’t have to wait longer than 30 minutes at any given place. On the drive back from Kaymakli we kept wondering how many other underground cities were located just near us. We definitely would like to go back and explore more.

All our pics from Kaymakli can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/117257906652666550268/KaymakliUndergroundCityCappadocia?authuser=0&feat=directlink

Cheers for Now -

Pamela and Dave