Life — Derinkuyu Underground City, Cappadocia

[Series: Things That Don’t Crumble - Türkiye] Vol.4 Life

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I had to crouch. No — crawl is the more honest word.

The ceilings are impossibly low.

Nearly 100 meters down and I never once straightened my back.

The moment the ceiling finally rose high enough to stand, I pressed my hands into my lower back and stretched.

The Underground City

The traces they left behind are strikingly precise.

Storage rooms, chapels, meditation desks, and intricate staircases.

Every floor, every room — even the stone furniture — follows a deliberate system.

Thousands of years of history, still sleeping right here.

They say oxygen levels are the same as above ground. Yet a strange dizziness crept in. Placebo?

A sealed space without a single ray of sunlight. Air thick with sulfur and musty dust, carrying a faintly metallic edge.

When people faced religious persecution or had nowhere left to run from war, they retreated here.

And here, people endured for generations.

Until their bodies withered from never seeing the sun.

A Reason to Live

With no burial ground, they dug trenches inside their rooms and buried family there. People who lived alongside death.

They built lives here.

Clinging to an invisible faith, they organized communities to hold each other up.

What did they dream of? Can you even dream in a place like this?

What were they hoping for?

What made them hope at all?

If not hope — then what holds a human being so stubbornly to life?

What is faith, really?

Or was it just an animal instinct to survive?

Maybe it was just a tool to prop up that instinct.

The Lowest Floor

The bottom of Derinkuyu is the 8th level.

Where the waste pit sits. The foulest place.

The closer to the surface — and the farther from the toilets — the higher your rank.

It is human nature to distance yourself from what stinks and what’s ugly.

I picture someone making their way downward.

Someone had to go down to that foulest place. That’s why the community survived.

I ask myself.

Am I ready to descend to the lowest floor?

When my work is dirty, thankless, and ugly — can I still call it my calling?

Back on the surface, even the air is different.

My pupils, clenched tight for so long, suddenly open. Everything goes white.

In that dizzy gap, I see myself.

Whenever growth stalled and no exit was in sight, I always reached for more. Wider spaces, better positions, bigger opportunities.

Convinced that if I could just get there, everything would work out.

Actually — let me be honest. I just wanted to get away from the dirty work. Spend my short life looking out for myself.

But Derinkuyu seems to ask the opposite.

Can you go to the lowest floor?

Can you hold the community together from down there?

A leader. The one who silently solves the problems on the 8th floor below — the floor no one else wants to touch.

Are you ready for that?

The blinding white cleared. My eyes found their focus.

Bright sunlight caught the hair of passers-by and shimmered.

(Fin.)