Nevşehir Underground City
Kaymaklı Underground City is contained within the citadel of Kaymaklı in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey. First opened to tourists in 1964, the village is about 19 km far from Nevşehir, on the Nevşehir-Niğde road.
The ancient name was Enegup. Caves may have first been built in the soft volcanic rock by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, in the 8th–7th centuries B.C., according to the Turkish Department of Culture. When the Phrygian language died out in Roman times, replaced with Greek, to which it was related, the inhabitants, now converted to Christianity, expanded their caverns adding the chapels and Greek inscriptions. This culture is sometimes referred to as Cappadocian Greek.
The city was greatly expanded and deepened in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) era, when it was used for protection from Muslim Arab raids during the four centuries of Arab–Byzantine wars (780-1180).The city was connected with Derinkuyu underground city through miles of tunnels. Some artifacts discovered in these underground settlements belong to the Middle Byzantine Period, between the 5th and the 10th centuries A.D. These cities continued to be used by the Christian inhabitants as protection from the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century
