BORN OF FIRE
Below the watchful eye of Erciyas Dağ (12,500 feet), the largest volcano in the old Turkish kingdom of Cappadocia, lies a virtually lunar landscape. Soft volcanic tufa, or hardened lava, has been eroded by the forces of nature to form curious shapes and curves unlike anything else on the planet. More curious still are the rock towers, formed by the wind as it has raced around large boulders of dark andesite and basalt resting on the soft tufa to create different-coloured cones of astounding charm and beauty. From the fourth century AD through till medieval times, Christians of the Early Church tunnelled out troglodyte habitations inside these natural towers. They even established churches and chapels within them, and these, along with the other wonders of Cappadocia, today attract tourists from all around the world.
Realm of the Peri
What seemed of greater significance to me was the fact that these strange towers were known as 'fairy chimneys'. Such a description seemed most appropriate, for those capped with boulders of rock really did look like tall, slim mushrooms of the sort that might make an ideal home for the fairy folk of myth and fable. Yet the naming of these cones had nothing to do with European folktales concerning the elfish denizens of fairyland, for in Turkey the towers are known as peri bacalari1 – the fire chimneys of the Peri, the beautiful fallen angels of Persian lore. Local tradition asserts that Erciyas Dağ, or Mount Argaeus, as it was known in classical times, is the dwelling-place of Eblis, the ancestor of the Peri – a theme exploited in the 1986 film Born of Fire,2 which features the Cappadocian fairy chimneys and, for reasons never made clear, subtle vulture imagery.
Somehow the indigenous peoples of Cappadocia had come to believe that the troglodyte dwellings carved out of the towering rock cones that litter the local landscape were originally created by fallen angels who had used them as fire chimneys.
Why?
What great secrets might these fairy chimneys hold? What had these towers of the Peri signified to the earliest inhabitants of Cappadocia? And how, if at all, might they relate to the Watcher birdmen of Kurdistan and the vulture shamans of nearby Çatal Hüyük? Something told me that this region held important clues concerning the origins of the fallen race – so much so that I decided to pay Cappadocia a visit. On-site investigations might well reveal vital clues not apparent from reading standard reference books on the general history of eastern Turkey.
I was accompanied on the trip3 by a friend named Ken Smith, who shared my interest in the possibility of an advanced culture having once existed in the Near East during prehistoric times. We left Ankara aboard a coach around first light, and had finally rolled into a small town named Aksaray at 8 a.m. local time. Weary from a lack of sleep over the previous two nights, we climbed aboard a local minibus, or dolmus, in a virtual somnambulistic state and headed out towards the heart of Cappadocia.
With nondescript Islamic folk music blasting out of the minibus stereo, I stared blankly at the bleak, rugged landscape, which for some reason reminded me of the setting for the fantasy film Conan the Barbarian. The main character, a fierce but noble warrior named Conan, played on screen by Arnold Schwarzenegger, worships an ancestor who had been the first person to forge an iron sword, giving him the power to become a god.
The chances were that very little of this wild rugged terrain had changed over the past 10,000 years; certainly since the time of the Çatal Hüyük culture, which had thrived over 8,000 years beforehand just 165 miles south-west of Kayseri, or Caesarea, Cappadocia's capital city in Roman times. Looking around at the local people in the dolmus, many either on their way to work or going to market, I wondered whether any of these might be direct descendants of Çatal Hüyük's highly advanced neolithic community. I very much doubted it, for there had been so many major migrations into the region across the millennia that the local inhabitants must possess a very mixed racial background. For instance, between the fifth to third centuries BC, Cappadocia supported a very large Persian community, which included Magian priests from Media.4 In the third century BC, it became an asylum for large numbers of Kurdish refugees escaping tribal and national hostilities in the extreme eastern limits of Anatolia.5 While in medieval times the local population was swollen by many thousands of Armenian Christians escaping persecution in their own country.
Much earlier, however, Akkadian merchants in the reign of Sargon of Agade, who reigned c. 2334–2279 BC, had set up a trading colony at Kültepe (ancient Kanesh), some twelve miles from Kayseri.6 Clay tablets of the period record that they possessed a thriving metal industry which exported silver, gold and semiprecious stones back to ancient Iraq. They would also appear to have imported raw materials such as tin from Azerbaijan and woven fabrics from their native homeland.7 This town is known to have survived until at least 1600 BC, by which time Cappadocia had been taken over by an Indo-Iranian race known as the Hittites.8
Ice Age Anatolia
Over four thousand years before the merchants of Akkad established their trading post in Asia Minor, Çatal Hüyük had displayed advanced forms of agriculture, metallurgy, as well as an inexplicable stone technology that, according to the archaeologist James Mellaart, marked the climax of an 'immensely long ancestry'.9 Where exactly this 'immensely long ancestry' had come from is not known. Even though Çatal Hüyük would appear to have had trade links with other parts of Anatolia and the Mediterranean coast, there is no real evidence to say whether they originated on the spot, or had migrated to the region from elsewhere. All the archaeologists know for sure is that the Çatal Hüyük culture appeared suddenly on the Konya plain amid a backdrop of very unstable climatic conditions. For example, there is good evidence to suggest that Anatolia was plunged into a mini ice age, c. 8850–8300 BC, following a relatively mild period after the recession of the last Ice Age proper, c. 9500–9000 BC.10
This glacial relapse would have brought with it intensely long periods of snow, ice and freezing conditions, which would have forced indigenous populations to seek réfuge in cave shelters in an attempt to survive on a day-to-day basis. This was significant, for the Çatal Hüyük folk's construction of its mostly sub-surface shrines and houses, all huddled together without exterior doors or windows, was clear evidence that they had evolved from a race that had once experienced a subterranean lifestyle, a point noted by archaeological writer Edward Bacon, who in his book Archaeology – Discoveries in the 1960s wrote:
It is almost as though the remotely ancestral houses of these people [of Çatal Hüyük] had been troglodytic holes in the ground . . . and that these dwellings had so to speak gradually emerged into the upper air, but still retaining the logic of undersurface dwellings.11
Recalling that the main religious cult of Çatal Hüyük had involved a form of vulture shamanism, my mind flicked to the account of Ishtar's descent into the underworld. She was said to have descended into 'the house of darkness' where 'the dwellers long for light' – the chief of whom 'are like birds covered with feathers'.12 Certainly, the priest-shamans of Çatal Hüyük and the Watchers of Kurdistan could be described as 'like birds covered with feathers', but had they ever lived underground?
The First Blacksmiths
There was another curious aspect of the Çatal Hüyük culture that needed attention, and this was their apparent interest in volcanoes. On the north and east walls of shrine VII. 14 of Level VII, dated to 6200 BC, James Mellaart and his team had uncovered a huge mural showing a town of closely grouped terraced houses, thought to represent Çatal Hüyük itself. Beyond this suburban setting was a huge twin-peaked mountain, above which were lines that signified a volcanic eruption. Sequences of dots denoted clouds of ash and the discharge of larger boulders, while other lines emanating from the base of the mountain appeared to depict the flow of lava.
There can be little doubt that this painting portrayed an eruption of the twin-peaked Hasan Dağ, a mountain of 10,673 feet lying at the eastern end of the Konya plain, in sight of Çatal Hüyük. That an artist should have felt moved enough to have captured this experience for posterity is intriguing in itself, for if nothing else it constitutes what is probably the oldest ever 'photograph' of a historical event.
But there seems to have been more to this pictorial record than simply capturing an historical event, for the Çatal Hüyük folk would appear to have taken an interest in other volcanoes of eastern Anatolia as well.13 From their foothills they collected various raw materials, including the all-important black obsidian glass, from which they made fine jewellery, knife blades and highly polished mirrors of incredible workmanship.14 Remember, black obsidian was also the earliest trade centred around Nemrut Dağ on the south-west shores of Lake Van, the proposed homeland of the Watchers, at a time when the volcanoes of Kurdistan were probably still very active.
And the connection with volcanoes did not appear to have been purely material, either. The decorations in each of Çatal Hüyük's sub-surface shrines were strictly organized into certain quarters: bulls on the north walls, so that they faced the southerly Taurus mountains; death imagery on east and north walls, so that it faced the setting sun, while the birth-related symbolism on the west wall faced the direction of the rising sun and the various volcanoes.15 This directional system clearly implied that the culture's interest in volcanoes was linked with the idea of spiritual birth, or indeed rebirth. At worst, it showed some kind of veneration of volcanoes, and, presumably, of fire as a whole.
As I had already established, fire had become the highest symbol of divinity in Indo-Iranian myth and ritual, with the oldest known fire altars dating back as early as 2000 BC.16 Both fire and vulcanism would have been linked by the people of Çatal Hüyük with the emerging art of metalworking, still in its infancy during the seventh millennium BC. Not only would copper and lead smelting have become a sacred occupation in its own right, but blacksmiths would have been classed as fire priests under the dominion of the genii of the fiery domains. In the Persian Shahnameh of the eleventh century, for instance, the early mythical king named Husheng (Haoshanha in much earlier Avestan literature), is said to have been the founder of civilization and the discoverer of fire, which he used to separate iron from rock for the first time. In this capacity he became the primordial blacksmith with the power to fashion metal objects, just like the ancestral god in Conan the Barbarian.17
So the significance of fire, and in particular of volcanic fire, becomes clearer – it signifies the magical power by which the blacksmiths could change rock into metal objects such as jewellery, tools and weapons.
The Cabiri of Phrygia
Sometime around 1200 BC the Anatolian plain as far east as Kayseri was overrun by a warlike race known to classical history as the Phrygians, who established the kingdom of Phrygia. According to very ancient classical sources, this kingdom had been the abode of a race of fire-genii known as the Cabiri. Indeed, according to the writers Plutarch and Strabo there had even been 'a country of the Cabiri' situated 'on the borders of Phrygia'.18 Greek mythology asserts that the Cabiri had been the first metalworkers – 'underground smiths' associated with the fire of volcanoes – born of Vulcan (or Hephaestus). He was the divine blacksmith and god of fire, from whom we derive the root for words such as 'volcano' and 'vulcanism'.19
The origins of the Cabiri are obscure, for they crop up in legends connected with several places, including the Greek island of Lemnos, Egypt, Thessaly and Phoenicia, and each time the story varies slightly. However, it is generally accepted that the original Cabiri legends came from Phrygia, and that they may well represent abstract memories of Asia Minor's most ancient metalworkers.20 Since we know these to have been the Çatal Hüyük folk of the Konya plain, then there is no reason not to link this culture with the traditions concerning the Cabiri's metalworking exploits at the dawn of civilization.
The country of the Cabiri never really existed in historical terms, but the fact that it was said to have been beyond the borders of Phrygia is significant, since beyond the eastern borders of this classical kingdom was the heartland of Cappadocia. Might the Cabiri have been the original inhabitants of the fire chimneys of the Peri? The mere thought of 'fire chimneys' conjured the idea of metal-smelting in hot furnaces. Had the Cabiri been the first metalworkers of Cappadocia, as well as the precursors of the Akkadian merchants who returned to this same region many thousands of years later to smelt gold, silver and other metals? If so, then who were the Cabiri?
I glanced across at the driver of the dolmus as he began fiddling with the radio tuner in an attempt to find a more suitable station. Each one seemed to be playing modern Turkish folk music, until by chance he hit a station that began blasting out the opening bars of The Bangles' inimitable hit 'Walk Like an Egyptian', much to the confusion and consternation of the other passengers, who were apparently unfamiliar with Western-style rock music. Its presence here, as we passed through this primordial landscape with its sunscorched plains and jagged hill-lines, seemed surreal in the extreme.
Houses of the Djinn
At the busy bus station of Nevşehir, our final destination point, local taxi drivers awaited the arrival of tourists in the hope of offering their services as tour guides at a competitive price. Having attempted to ignore them all, Ken and I found ourselves bartering with a young Turkish student who was offering to show us local sites of interest, many of which were already on our list. After some discussion, we gave in and agreed that he would act as our driver for the next day or so.
Throwing our hand-luggage into the boot of his bashed-up old car, we found ourselves heading out to the rock castle of Uçhisar, perhaps one of the largest of the volcanic cones in the region. So big was its interior, that it had become home to whole communities of people from the Christian era right down to the present day. It even houses a hotel, with wine on tap! From an opening in the castle's honeycomb network of disused troglodyte rooms, a breathtaking view of the whole region could be obtained. Like a symbol of omnipotent godhead, the snow-capped peak of Erciyas Dağ seemed to dominate the eastern skyline. Stretched out before us in every direction were literally thousands of fairy chimneys in different shades of red, orange, yellow, black and white, many of them between seventy-five and eighty feet high.
Our driver introduced himself as Ahmed, a student of Turkish history and archaeology. He said he liked acting as a guide to tourists because it allowed him to learn English, for he had good intentions of applying for a university place in Britain. I bombarded him with questions relating to the local terrain, but most of these he found near impossible to answer. Everything he needed to know under normal circumstances had been written out in English on hand-held wooden boards, which he could recite parrot fashion at each site.
He did say that the mythical builders of the fairy chimneys were seen by local people not so much as Peri but as djinn, which even today they believe to inhabit the rock towers. Immense superstition surrounds the rock cones and no local will go near them, except for a very good reason indeed. They say that only those who are being punished for some crime, or who have been kidnapped by the djinn, enter such places.21
In one lonely volcanic valley at a place named Zelve, every cleft in the rock had been tunnelled out to form countless hundreds of individual troglodyte dwellings that penetrated deep into the soft volcanic rock. Scholars believe they were originally inhabited by communities of Christians under the control of early Church Fathers of Caesarea, such as St Basil the Great (AD 330–79) and St Gregory of Nyssa (AD 335–95). Now they were homes only to huge flocks of pigeons that circled overhead emitting a constant aerial babble which seemed quite eerie in this strange troglodyte realm of the djinn.
During the next twenty-four hours we visited fairy chimneys throughout the area, including those that made up the famous complex of rock churches just outside the village of Göreme. The interiors of these were generally of one basic style, consisting of an eastern apse, adjoined to a domed nave with side-aisles and chapels separated by carved arches and pillars. The decoration, however, was of two distinct sorts – so-called early Christian art, consisting of simple ochre-red drawings, and more accomplished coloured frescos of the early medieval period, which featured images of Christ, the Panagia (Virgin Mary), the angels and the saints, all done in the style of the Byzantine Church of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). It was, however, the much cruder 'Christian' art that drew my attention, for aside from containing more obvious Maltese-and calvary-style crosses, as well as other recognizable symbols of the Early Church, some of the rock churches contained meander patterns and geometric designs that appeared to match exactly the wall-paintings that had decorated the 8,500-year-old shrines at Çatal Hüyük. The comparison of the two quite distinct styles was startling and could not be denied. For instance, on the walls of shrines VI.A and VI.B at Çatal Hüyük there were geometric decorations that matched very closely those to be seen on the upper walls of St Barbara's church at Göreme.22
This may at first seem like a quite remarkable discovery, but there was a logical solution to this mystery. As James Mellaart had realized, many of the intricate geometric patterns found among the wall-paintings of Çatal Hüyük appeared to imitate the repetitive designs woven into the thin woollen rugs known as kilims, still made today in eastern Turkey.23 This implied that some of these carpet patterns were several thousand years old and had their roots in the earliest neolithic communities of the region. Indeed, in shrine VII at Çatal Hüyük, Mellaart found two wall-paintings in the kilim style that bore what appeared to be stitch-lines around the outside edges, suggesting that the mural had been copied from the design on a rug.24
The kilim connection showed an indirect continuity of styles and patterns from protoneolithic Çatal Hüyük, right down to the Christian era, a time-frame of at least six thousand years. Yet this theory in no way accounted for a variety of quite obscure imagery to be seen on the walls of some of these rock churches at Göreme, particularly in the church of St Barbara and a small, unnamed chapel next to the so-called 'Dark Church'. On the ceiling of the former were various painted circles containing strange angular lines, zigzags and points that, if not randomly chosen, seemed to represent a primitive form of hieroglyphics. There were also whole sequences of rectangular boxes and round-edged triangles, some containing zigzag lines, others with small circles or lines on their corners, as if signifying appended heads and limbs. These sat upon double-lined 'stilts', some bearing zigzag patterns. What these images represented is unknown, although my first impressions were that the stilt-like lines implied a descent underground.
The most peculiar feature of all to be seen in St Barbara's church was a crude red-ochre line painting of a strange bird with a large wedge-shaped tail, an upturned open beak and a bulbous body covered in cross-hatching to represent feathers. Christian scholars would suggest that it represented a peacock, one of the symbols of the 'resurrection' in Early Church iconography, found not only in the troglodyte churches of Cappadocia but also within the catacombs of Rome. This theory did not, however, explain the bird's hands, arms and articulated legs, which clearly implied that the image portrayed an anthropomorphic figure, plausibly a shaman, dressed in the garb of a bird. There were even indications that the raised beak might actually be a form of totemic headdress.
What on earth was a clear depiction of a bird shaman doing inside the fourth-or fifth-century church of St Barbara at Göreme? There was no logical solution to this curious enigma, other than to suggest that the earliest Christians of Cappadocia must have been the inheritors of much older shamanistic traditions that dated back as far as the early neolithic period. This was a tantalizing possibility; however, another was to suggest that this was not Christian imagery at all, but the artistic expression of a culture that had previously used these rock-cut dwellings for their own ritualistic purposes before they were seconded for Christian usage.
We left behind the rock churches of Göreme convinced that there were genuine mysteries still to be unravelled here: mysteries which predated the Christian era by a very long time indeed.
Subterranean Worlds
As we found the car, Ahmed asked Ken and I what we would like to visit next. 'Do you want to see the underground cities?' he had suggested helpfully. 'They attract many, many tourists every year.'
Contemplating his words for a long moment, I asked him: 'What underground cities?'
'There are many of them around here,' he casually responded. 'They were made by the Christians escaping the Arab persecutions. They went underground to hide from them. Many thousands of people they could hold, perhaps even 20,000 in Derinkuyu.'
To say I was dumb-struck would be an understatement. Underground cities holding up to 20,000 people; constructed deep underground just so that the Christians could hide from the Arab Islamic onslaught of 642 AD? Something did not quite add up. Surely the logical course of action for any community or culture fearing the crushing might of an invading army would be to retreat to safer regions. Indeed, this is exactly what a great number of the secular and monastic Christians of Cappadocia had done, establishing new settlements in Eastern Europe, particularly in Greece. It sounded like madness to dig a hole in the ground and hide away in the hope that your persecutors would eventually withdraw from the region.
Once we decided we must visit at least one of these underground cities, Ahmed drove us out to a village named Kaymakli. Its particular subterranean kingdom had been discovered only in 1964, and it had still not been explored thoroughly. No one knew exactly how many levels it possessed, although the upper four storeys had now been made safe for visitors.
Entering the underground city, we descended flights of stone steps and found ourselves in corridor after corridor hewn out perfectly from the volcanic rock, which hardens on exposure to the air. Each passageway seemed enormous, with a width of anything up to ten or so feet across and headroom of well over six and a half feet. Into each passage opened other connecting tunnels, leading to still more sections of the complex. On each side of the corridors were maze-like complexes of rooms and halls that had once formed bedrooms, food warehouses, water stores, wine cellars, temples and, yes, even a Christian church. Each room had been cut with such accuracy from the bedrock that it was clear that only thin walls divided it from its neighbours. Ventilation was provided by a whole system of shafts that connected all levels with the surface, while huge wheel-like doors made of hard dark stone and known locally as tirhiz, or tarkoz, could be used to seal off each individual section or level as and when required.25
There was no real indication of exactly who had constructed this subterranean citadel, although the presence of the church certainly confirmed that early Christians had occupied at least some of its levels. Rock-cut tomb hollows had been found on the sloping rocks above the city, and these may also have been of Christian origin. Yet, apart from this evidence, there was no obvious reason to suggest that the Christians of Cappadocia had actually constructed this city complex.
On the way out I stopped at the ticket office to purchase two books on local history. Both contained sections on the underground cities, but one of them, Cappadocia – Cradle of History by Ömer Demir, seemed infinitely more important. Since 1968 Demir had investigated the underground cities in his capacity as historian and archaeologist, and therefore he probably knew them better than anyone else. He had worked on-site with foreign archaeological teams and had felt sufficiently knowledgeable on Cappadocia's long history to write a book about the subject.
Ahmed returned us to Nevşehir, and as soon as we had settled into a second-floor hotel room overlooking the main street, I decided to read Demir's book from cover to cover, despite somewhat weary eyes after so little sleep during the previous few days. I was glad I did, for I quickly realized that this local archaeologist had stumbled across something of immense significance with respect to Cappadocia's subterranean world.
There were not just a few underground cities, as I had imagined, but an incredible thirty-six of them scattered about the Cappadocian landscape. Most had never properly been explored, although the largest one known so far was located in the nearby town of Derinkuyu. Curiously enough, its existence had remained unknown until 1963, when one of its entrances was accidentally discovered by local people. Two years later it was opened to the public. Demir quite aptly described this vast underworld, covering an estimated two and a half square miles, as 'the eighth wonder of the world'.26
So far eight different levels had been explored at Derinkuyu, though between eighteen and twenty are known to exist. The first three storeys alone contained approximately 2,000 households, providing accommodation for an estimated 10,000 people.27 Scholars have estimated that anything up to 20,000 people could have lived comfortably in the Derinkuyu complex at anyone time, and if this figure is considered in the knowledge that at least another thirty-five similar cities exist in the region, then it paints an awesome picture of what appears to have been going on here in ancient times. Anything between 100,000 and 200,000 people would have been able to live comfortably in these citadels for any conceivable length of time. More incredible still is the fact that long tunnels are known to have linked several of these cities. One such tunnel, situated on the third storey at Derinkuyu, is thought to connect with the underground complex of Kaymakli five miles away.28 Moreover, the passageway in question contains ventilation ducts to the surface and is large enough to enable between three to four people to walk upright, side by side, along its entire course.
Does this description sound like the handiwork of pious Christians trying to avoid the capture of Arab invaders?
Not in my opinion.
Deep below Derinkuyu
It seems quite amazing that the people of Derinkuyu never stumbled on the existence of its lost citadel long before. The name of the town means 'deep well', a reference to the many wells that acted as ventilation shafts from all levels of the complex to the surface and supplied the inhabitants with constant supplies of water. These wells, often marked on the surface by a pair of upright monoliths, had been the town's main source of water until 1962, yet never had they twigged that each one was connected to a vast underground city directly below their feet.
The Derinkuyu complex has no less than fifty-two of these ventilation shafts, which descend to depths of between sixty-five and seventy-seven yards. Temperatures within the city complex remain a constant 7–8°C, meaning that it would have been an ideal place of refuge during either extremely hot or extremely cold weather conditions. As at Kaymakli, huge wheel-like stone doors were able to seal off each section, while no less than 15,000 air ducts connected the first subterranean level with the surface, a distance of between eight and ten feet. The strange thing is that these shafts have diameters as small as four inches, a near-impossible achievement without the use of metal-tipped drills.29 The early Christians are not known to have had such sophisticated tools.
Another mystery that has baffled the experts is what happened to the rubble displaced by the construction of the Derinkuyu complex? Some have supposed that a local hill called Sögdele to the west of the town might provide an answer, while Ömer Demir has suggested that the loose rock and ballast was poured into local streams and carried down towards Kaymakli.30 Both these theories have their shortcomings, although the most important conclusion that can be drawn from this unsolved mystery is that the city must be immensely old, for it would have taken an extremely long time for all trace of these excavations to have disappeared so effectively.
So who did construct the subterranean kingdom of Derinkuyu, not to mention the other thirty-five cities scattered about the region?
Ömer Demir is convinced that parts of Derinkuyu are extremely ancient. Even though no datable artefacts or remains have been uncovered from periods earlier than the Christian era, there are major differences in the architectural and building styles of the different levels. He is convinced, for instance, that although the Christians may have lived in different sections of Derinkuyu, they only constructed, or redesigned, some of its storeys.
So how old did he believe these citadels to be?
According to Demir, parts of the underground complex could well have been constructed during the late palaeolithic age, the epoch in human history marked by the cessation of the last Ice Age, c. 9500–9000 BC.31
On what evidence did he base this theory?
In 1910 an English archaeologist named R. Campbell-Thompson discovered hand-axes, rock chips and other upper palaeolithic artefacts in the Söganli stream, some sixteen miles from Derinkuyu.32 These were of a sort that could conceivably have been used to carve out the soft tufa rock ejected in molten form by Erciyas Dağ during a remote geological age. In itself this knowledge was insufficient to date the Derinkuyu citadel; however, Ömer Demir had become convinced that it must have been present during the Hittite age, since the foundations of their buildings were situated around the well-shafts belonging to the subterranean city.33 Furthermore, unlike the various other Hittite towns that were razed to the ground when the Phrygians overran Cappadocia around 1200 BC, the buildings of Derinkuyu were left untouched. Demir supposes that this may well indicate that the Hittites escaped the Phrygian onslaught by taking refuge in the first level of the underground city.34
These were his views. Clearly we needed to visit Derinkuyu and speak with Ömer Demir to see if he could add anything further to his extraordinary theory.
The House of Darkness
Following a second day of sightseeing in the Göreme area, Ken and I took a dolmus out to Derinkuyu in the sweltering summer heat. From the outside of the underground city nothing is visible to the eye, except a slightly raised bank with an opening that appeared to be disgorging brightly attired tourists. Inside, however, we found a vast cyclopean domain unlike anything I could imagine anyone wanting to build.
In theory, there was simply no need to construct complete towns underground, unless you were attempting to escape from the world outside. Once again I recalled Ishtar's account of her descent into 'the house of darkness' where 'there is no exit' and 'the dwellers long for light'. I remembered too the words of Edward Bacon commenting on the sub-surface dwellings and shrines at Çatal Hüyük: 'It is almost as though the remotely ancestral houses of these people had been troglodytic holes in the ground.'
Strangely enough, on the levels considered by Demir to be among the oldest, the headroom in the corridors was much higher than other sections or levels, giving a maximum height of around seven feet. In the 'later' storeys, the headroom was so low that we had to stoop to navigate the tunnels, which were also much narrower in these areas. Why build some sections with extremely high ceilings when common sense deems that they need only be as high as is necessary?
Who then was this tall race that had inhabited the earliest phases of Derinkuyu? Might they have been the troglodytic ancestors of the Çatal Hüyük culture, who had established their own subsurface city just 115 miles to the south-west? The epoch surrounding the climatic and geological upheavals that accompanied the last Ice Age is the only time when humanity has spent long periods of time hiding away from the outside world. In archaeological terms, this epoch is known as the upper palaeolithic, and it was during this same age that the stone implements found near Derinkuyu, and cited by Demir as evidence of the underground city's immense age, had been fashioned and used.
Perhaps inevitably, Ken and I managed to get lost within the labyrinthine network of roads, tunnels, stairways and rooms that filled all eight storeys. Once we had found our way back into the bright sunlight, we tracked down Omer Demir to the ticket office, for he is now curator and guardian of the citadel. He was a tall, slight figure, mature of age, with dark, greying features and a bushy moustache, like those sported by so many men in Turkey.
The archaeologist welcomed us politely, and after finding common ground I asked him whether he had discovered any further clues to suggest that the oldest phases of the city dated to the late palaeolithic era. Using what little English he knew, he went over the same story concerning the stone tools found in the local stream. He said he was also now convinced that the oldest parts of the complex had been hewn out, not by metal tools, but by stone implements – a conclusion drawn after studying the different building styles in the various levels. Like Ken and me, he had also realized that the oldest parts appeared to have much higher ceilings, as if they had been designed to suit a tall race of people.
Other than this, he could offer no further proof of his theory, but did then proceed to give us quite a shock. It seemed that other ancient mysteries researchers had also taken a keen interest in the underground cities of Cappadocia. David Zink, author of such new age archaeology books as The Stones Speak and The Stones of Atlantis, had placed a special significance not only in Derinkuyu but also in the strange 'Christian' wall-paintings found in St Barbara's church. He and his team of experts had even been given permission by the local authorities to 'restore' this imagery. In addition to this, it seemed that the ancient-astronaut theorist, Erich von Däniken, had also visited Derinkuyu. He, however, had concluded that the citadels were constructed by a now lost civilization to escape the threat of aerial attacks from extraterrestrials who said they would return to punish the human race if it disobeyed the universal laws!35
For me, the answer was perhaps a little more down to earth, even though I did accept the possibility that the Derinkuyu complex may well have been constructed towards the end of the last Ice Age. Von Däniken had, however, drawn attention to some pertinent points about Derinkuyu and the other underground cities, including the perhaps obvious fact that their inhabitants would still have been dependent on the outside world for food, since plant produce cannot be grown without sunlight. This therefore made nonsense of the suggestion that the citadels had been built as refuges against attack. The exterior land cultivation necessary to sustain a community of between 10,000 and 20,000 for any length of time would have betrayed the presence of any such subterranean population. All the attackers would have needed to do was wait by the blocked entrances and simply starve them out.
No, the earliest inhabitants of these underworld domains were hiding not from people, but from the forces of nature. Only with an aggressor like nature could a community still exploit the environment outside for hunting and land cultivation without the threat of a potentially disastrous siege.
But who were these unknown people who had lived in the underworld?
Derinkuyu sits in a huge geological basin between two great volcanoes – Hasan Dağ around thirty-five miles to the south-west and Erciyas Dağ, some forty miles to the east-north-east. Why site an underground city so near to volcanoes that were very possibly still active during the last Ice Age? The obvious answer was the presence of the soft tufa lava, ideal for hollowing out by human hands. Yet was there more to this reasoning than simply that?
It seems plausible that the Çatal Hüyük folk revered the volcanoes of eastern Anatolia as the source of life. Did they therefore believe that their ancestors had been born of fire, like the djinn and Peri of much later Arabic tradition? Were the inhabitants of the underground cities also behind the Phrygian legends of the Cabiri, the 'underground smiths' associated with the fire of volcanoes? Had the descendants of this unknown culture gone on not only to inhabit the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia but also to found the Çatal Hüyük culture of central Anatolia? Perhaps the remnants of this advanced civilization had supplied the people of Çatal Hüyük with its superior knowledge of how to polish obsidian mirrors without scratching their surface, and how to drill holes so fine that a modern steel needle cannot penetrate them. If so, then who exactly was this advanced civilization and what might its connection have been to the proposed Watcher culture of Kurdistan?