Cappadocia’s Underground Cities: Ancient Refuges in Turkey

Beneath the fairy chimneys and honey-coloured valleys of central Turkey lies a second Cappadocia, one carved downward rather than up. Entire settlements — stables, kitchens, wine presses, chapels — were hollowed from soft volcanic rock centuries before anyone thought to build a house of stone above ground. At Saratlı, one of the region’s lesser-visited underground cities, three of seven excavated levels are open to walk through today, offering a rare, tangible sense of how communities once lived, worked and sheltered entirely out of the sun. Our small group tour of Turkey descends into Saratlı on Day 7, on the road between Ankara and Cappadocia proper.

What Are Cappadocia’s Underground Cities?

Cappadocia’s geology made this kind of building possible. The region sits atop thick layers of volcanic tuff, laid down by eruptions from Erciyes and Hasan Dağ millions of years ago. Tuff is soft enough to carve with hand tools when freshly exposed, then hardens on contact with air — a combination that let early inhabitants dig homes, churches and, eventually, entire multi-storey cities straight into the rock rather than build upward from it.

More than 200 underground settlements have been identified across the region, ranging from single-family cellars to vast complexes capable of sheltering thousands. Derinkuyu, the largest known example, descends some 60 metres and connected by tunnel to Kaymaklı several kilometres away. Saratlı is smaller and far less crowded with visitors, which makes it a good place to actually absorb the scale of the engineering rather than shuffle through it. Its layout — stables near the surface, storage and living quarters below, wells sunk deeper still — is typical of how these cities were organised throughout Cappadocia.

Saratlı and the Engineering of Survival

Digging a livable city underground raises problems that have nothing to do with the digging itself: how do you breathe, how do you keep water flowing, and how do you seal a passage against an enemy in seconds? Saratlı’s builders solved all three with tools still visible in the rock today.

Ventilation shafts, some running the full depth of the settlement, drew air down through vertical chimneys cut into the stone, keeping even the lowest chambers breathable. Wells were dug independently of the shafts, and in the largest Cappadocian cities were built with no surface access at all, so that an enemy above ground couldn’t poison a city’s water supply without knowing exactly where to look. Most striking are the circular stone doors — massive discs of rock cut to fit precisely into a corridor, rolled into place from the inside, and impossible to move from the other side. A single door of this kind could seal off an entire level in moments.

Refuge in Times of Persecution

The underground cities weren’t built for one single purpose, and their use changed considerably across the centuries. Some of the earliest chambers may date back to the Bronze Age, when this part of Anatolia was Hatti, homeland of the Hittites. But it was much later, in the Byzantine era, that these spaces became critical as places of refuge — most notably for early Christian communities seeking to worship and live away from persecution, and later as shelter during Arab raids into Byzantine Anatolia between the 7th and 10th centuries.

Cave churches carved into the same soft rock, some still bearing faded frescoes, sit alongside domestic chambers throughout the region, a reminder that these weren’t only defensive structures but functioning communities that could remain self-sufficient underground for weeks at a time. Walking through Saratlı’s passages today, with their smoke-blackened kitchen niches and worn stone floors, it’s not difficult to imagine a household of the 9th century managing daily life several storeys beneath the vineyards.

Life Below Ground: Daily Survival

Practical detail shaped every level of an underground city. Stables were kept nearest the surface, both to shorten the walk for livestock and to use animal body heat to help warm the levels below. Storage rooms for wine, oil and grain were cut with narrow openings that stayed cool year-round, functioning much like a modern cellar. Kitchens show blackened ceilings from generations of cooking fires, with smoke drawn up through the same shafts that carried fresh air down.

Living quarters were typically small and simple — low, narrow chambers built for sleeping and short-term shelter rather than permanent comfort. That’s consistent with what historians believe about how these cities were used: not as year-round settlements, but as places a community could retreat to for days or weeks when danger passed overhead, before returning to farm the surface once again. The rock itself did the rest of the work, holding a near-constant temperature regardless of the season above.

Visiting Cappadocia’s Underground Cities Today

Saratlı’s more modest scale, compared to Derinkuyu or Kaymaklı, is part of its appeal for travellers who’d rather explore at a considered pace than queue through crowded corridors. Three of its seven levels are open for visitors, enough to take in stables, storage chambers, ventilation shafts and at least one rolling stone door without the tunnels ever feeling like a bottleneck.

The ceilings throughout are low and the passages narrow by modern standards, built for people who were, on average, considerably shorter than today’s visitors. Sturdy, low-heeled shoes are worth packing specifically for this stop, and a personal torch is useful even where lighting has been installed. It’s a site best appreciated with context rather than alone — understanding what you’re looking at, chamber by chamber, is most of the value of being there.

Why See This on a Small Group Tour

An underground city rewards a slower, guided visit far more than a rushed one. Our 21-day small group tour of Turkey travels in groups of just 6 to 12 people, with an experienced local guide accompanying every stop from Istanbul through to Cappadocia and beyond, including couples and solo travellers who make up a regular part of each departure. Saratlı sits on Day 7 of the itinerary, on the drive between Ankara and Cappadocia, ahead of two further days exploring the fairy chimneys and cave churches above ground. Along the way, the tour also stops at Hattusa, capital of the Hittite Empire, whose builders were shaping this same stretch of Anatolia long before the underground cities took their final form.

For more on the wider region above ground, see our guide to Cappadocia, Turkey, and our article on the Hittite Empire, which sits earlier in this tour’s itinerary.

A City Built to Disappear

What makes Cappadocia’s underground cities remarkable isn’t just their scale, but how completely they could vanish when needed — a community, its livestock, its stores of food, all sealed behind a rolling stone door and indistinguishable from the hillside above. Saratlı offers a manageable, well-preserved way to understand that engineering firsthand, without the crowds of the region’s largest sites. For travellers curious about how people actually survived here across two thousand years of shifting empires, it’s one of the more quietly extraordinary stops on the road through Turkey.