An Underground City Beneath a Turkish Town Reopens After 2,000 Years

Visitors descend a stone staircase and the temperature drops ten degrees. What follows is eight levels of hand-carved rooms — chapels with intact crosses, wine presses, rolling stone doors that still turn on their original pivots.

The ventilation shafts are the detail engineers keep returning to. Dozens of vertical channels, some over 50 metres deep, keep air moving through the entire complex without any machinery.

The newly opened section will accept 400 visitors a day at first, a number conservatively set to protect frescoes that have already survived two millennia of candle smoke.

“Archaeologists have stabilized eight new levels of tunnels, revealing chapels, stables and a ventilation system that still works.”