Tagged “turkey”
HIGH WONDERDerinkuyu Underground City
Who first carved Derinkuyu into the rock, when did they begin, and how did its builders engineer effective ventilation and manage the excavation and removal of so much stone for a refuge meant to hold thousands?
possibly begun c. 8th-7th century BCE, substantially expanded and used through the Byzantine era · Derinkuyu, Nevşehir Province, Cappadocia, TurkeyAdded July 2026
MUST READGöbekli Tepe
How did hunter-gatherers with no metal tools, pottery, or agriculture organize the labor to quarry, move, and raise multi-ton carved pillars, and why?
c. 9600-8000 BCE (Pre-Pottery Neolithic) · Şanlıurfa, Southeastern Anatolia, TurkeyAdded July 2026
MUST READKarahan Tepe
How did a community with no metal tools, agriculture, or pottery organize the labor to carve hundreds of T-shaped pillars and an entire chamber of monumental pillars directly out of the bedrock, and what did the room's carved head and snake mean to them?
c. 9500-8200 BCE (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A/B) · Şanlıurfa Province, Southeastern Anatolia, TürkiyeAdded July 2026
The Lycian Rock-Cut Tombs
Why did one people spend two centuries cutting their houses into cliffs — copying, beam for beam and plank for plank, a timber architecture that has since rotted away completely, so that the only surviving record of how Lycians lived is where they buried their dead?
mainly 5th-4th centuries BCE, with the great cliff necropoleis concentrated in the 4th century BCE · Lycia — Myra, Telmessos (Fethiye) and Xanthos, southwestern TürkiyeAdded August 2026
Mount Nemrut (Nemrut Dağı)
Why did the king of a small buffer state pour a kingdom's resources into raising multi-tonne colossal statues and a 50-metre mound of crushed rock on a remote 2,100-metre peak — and where, beneath that unexcavated tumulus, is the tomb it was built to hide?
mid-1st century BCE (reign of Antiochus I of Commagene, c. 69–34 BCE) · Nemrut Dağı, Adıyaman Province, TurkeyAdded July 2026