Kaymaklı
"Derinkuyu gets the crowds. Kaymaklı gets the same tunnels and half the people."
A quieter, wider underground city than its famous neighbor Derinkuyu, built around storage rooms and stables instead of grand chambers, and still connected to it by tunnels nobody has fully mapped.
Everyone visits Derinkuyu; fewer people make it the extra ten kilometres to Kaymaklı, and I think that’s a mistake, because Kaymaklı is in some ways the more atmospheric of the two Cappadocian underground cities. It’s wider and shallower — only four of its eight levels are open to visitors, and it doesn’t plunge as dramatically as its more famous neighbor — but what it lacks in depth it makes up for in density. The tunnels here feel less like a museum circuit and more like an actual settlement you’re allowed to wander through, room after room of storage cellars, stables, and kitchens carved directly out of the rock, arranged around a central ventilation shaft that also served as a communal well.
I went with almost no other visitors around on a grey Tuesday morning, which changed the whole experience. Without a shuffling queue ahead of me, I could actually stop in the rooms and look — at the grinding stones still sitting where they were carved, worn smooth in a shallow groove from centuries of use; at a small chapel with a stone altar; at what the guide called a “relief winery,” a sloped channel cut into the floor that let grape juice drain downward into collection jars during pressing. The whole underground city was built around practical continuity rather than defense alone: people weren’t just hiding here during raids, they were farming, brewing, and raising animals underground for stretches that could apparently last months.
The connection to Derinkuyu is the detail that stays with me. A tunnel roughly nine kilometres long is believed to link the two cities, allowing people to move between them without ever surfacing, though most of that connecting passage remains unexcavated and closed to visitors. Standing at the point in Kaymaklı where the guide gestured vaguely toward “that direction, toward Derinkuyu,” I got a small vertiginous sense of how much of the plateau’s history is simply still underground, unexplored, waiting for a tractor or an archaeologist to stumble into it.
When to go: Late morning on a weekday, after the first tour groups clear out. Combine it with Derinkuyu on the same day if you want the comparison — they’re close enough to visit both before lunch.