300 miles from the ancient
site of Gobekli Tepe.
December 28th, 2014.
A local crew excavating for
an urban renovation project
stumbles across a strange series
of carved rooms and tunnels
deep underground.
Upon further exploration, they
find the subterranean network
spans several miles and
extends hundreds of feet
below the surface of the earth,
much like the nearby caves
of Derinkuyu.
ANDREW COLLINS:
What they discovered
was that these caves
extended for a distance
of 370 feet down into the rock.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists
estimate that more than 5
million square feet of rock--
the volume of over 370
Olympic-sized swimming pools--
was removed to carve out
this subterranean city,
yet there is no evidence of the
extracted material in the area.
This mysterious cave system
is still under excavation
and closed to the public.
But in June 2017, author and
researcher Andrew Collins
was granted access to the site.
The sheer size of
some of these rooms
is absolutely amazing.
I mean, this one that we're
in now is 120 feet in length.
And yet, it's just one of
hundreds of similar rooms
that we find inside
this great hill.
These tunnels that you
see seem to go on and on.
And yet, what's incredible
is that not only
were they full of
people, but there
was also livestock down here.
And we're told that as
many as 20,000 people,
perhaps even as much
as 60,000, could have
lived here at any one time.
NARRATOR: Not only is there
evidence that these caves once
housed thousands of people,
but archaeologists have found
air vents and water
wells that would
have made it possible
to live underground
for years at a time.
These were cut
deeply into the rock,
sometimes for hundreds
of yards in depth.
And at the base
of them were wells
that provided water to these
underground populations.
This is what is known
as a self-sealing door.
And they are, in fact,
huge, great stone wheels,
made of a volcanic
rock known as basalt.
Their function was that they
would be wheeled into position
so that they would lock so
that nobody was able to get
inside the underground cities.
NARRATOR: When it
was discovered,
historians recovered artifacts
that suggest the cave system
was used by the early Christians
to escape persecution,
so they dated the site to be
approximately 1,500 years old.
But based on new evidence,
the caves might be much older.
ANDREW COLLINS: A few years ago,
I interviewed an archaeologist
by the name of Omer
Demir, and he found
within it paleolithic tools.
Tools that went
back at least 10,000
to 12,000 years, and
arguably even earlier still.
