Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century BC.
Archeologists 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 120m of tunnel carved out of the rock.
Photo: AFP
However, that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000m2 area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’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.”
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 BC, the empire stretched from the Persian 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 said 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.”
The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world.
Many major empires conquered or passed through these lands, which might have given those living around Matiate a reason to take refuge underground.
“Before the arrival of the Arabs, these lands were fiercely disputed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and then the Byzantines,” said Ekrem Akman, a historian at the nearby University of Mardin.
Yavuz said that “Christians from the Hatay region, fleeing from the persecution of the Roman Empire ... built monasteries in the mountains to avoid their attacks.”
He suspects that Jews and Christians might have used Matiate as a hiding place to practice their then-banned religions underground.
He pointed to the inscrutable stylized carvings — a horse, an eight-point star, a hand and trees — which adorn the walls, as well as a stone slab on the floor of one room that might have been used for celebrations or for sacrifices.
As a result of the city’s long continuous occupation, he said it was “difficult to pinpoint” exactly what at the site can be attributed to which period or group.
However, “pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, all these believers contributed to the underground city of Matiate,” Yavuz said.
Even after the threat of centuries of invasions had passed, the caves stayed in use, curator Gani Tarkan said.
He used to work as a director at the Mardin Museum, where household items, bronzes and potteries recovered from the caves are on display.
“People continued to use this place as a living space,” Tarkan said. “Some rooms were used as catacombs, others as storage space.”
Excavation leader Yavuz pointed to a series of round holes dug to hold wine-filled amphorae in the gloomy cool, out of the glaring sunlight above.
To this day, the Mardin region’s Orthodox Christian community maintains wine production using the vessels.
Turkey is also famous for its ancient cave villages in Cappadocia in the center of the country.
However, while Cappadocia’s underground cities are built with rooms vertically stacked on top of each other, Matiate spreads out horizontally, Tarkan said.
The municipality of Midyat, which funds the works, plans to continue the excavation until the site can be opened to the public.
It hopes the site will prove a popular tourist attraction.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000