Man discovers subterranean city beneath his home in Anatolia

A home owner living in the Melikgazi district of Kayseri province in Anatolia made a surprising discovery while clearing out an area under his house – a subterranean city

A man recently discovered a small subterranean city beneath a home he was renovating in Anatolia, Turkey.

About 4,000 square meters of the underground city have already been uncovered in the region famous for its extensive underground labyrinths and homes, according to

Ancient-Origins.net

.

Mustafa Bozdemir, 50, said he was given the house in Turkey five years ago.

At the time, he thought it was a single story home and decided to clear some stuff out from underneath it to prepare it for renovations.

"We also found some remains during the cleaning works such as human bones," Bozdemir said. "They were examined by a team from Erciyes University."

In one region in Anatolia, dozens of cities and 200 smaller villages have already been discovered beneath the surface, along with temples and secret tombs.

Nuvit Bayar, the project director for the restoration company working on the house, said that

workers thought they could find space for storage beneath Bozdemir's house and were shocked to find tunnels.

"The underground city that we found by accident during restoration begins a few meters under the ground and has two levels," Bayar

said

. "There are parts resembling underground remains of settlements in Cappadocia. Wonderful structures emerged everywhere, like an iron workshop and a loft."

Bozdemir told officials about the site soon after the discovery and is allowing government workers to excavate the hidden city completely.

"We think that the underground city was active in the Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk eras and other stone buildings there were built in the Ottoman and Republican periods," mayor Mehmet Osmanbasoglu told

Zaman Online

.

© Wikimedia.

The newly-discovered underground structure in Melikgazi has been compared to Cappadocia (pictured) where hundreds of subterranean structures have been found.

Comment:

The region of Anatolia in Turkey is known to have the most spectacular underground networks in the world. One of the most magnificent subterranean cities is Derinkuyu, which is eleven levels deep, has 600 entrances, consists of many miles of tunnels connecting it to other underground cities, and can accommodate thousands of people. It is truly an underground city, with areas for sleeping, stables for livestock, wells, water tanks, pits for cooking, ventilation shafts, communal rooms, bathrooms, and tombs.

Inside the intriguing ancient underground city of Derinkuyu