For centuries, people have lived in caves and tunnels under this region of Turkey. Now the subterranean city is serving a new purpose – as storage for vast quantities of agricultural produce

Homes carved into the rock at the edge of the underground city at Uchisar, in the Turkish region of Cappadocia. Photograph: Gunter Flegar/Corbis

The 98 square kilometres of the Cappadocia region in Turkey make for a strange landscape. Powdery white soil gives the place a lunar feel. The hollowed out hillsides and 10-metre tall “fairy chimneys”, a tourist attraction crafted by wind and rain, could be leftovers from a 1970s James Bond set. At night, lights flicker in the cones of rock, which hundreds of people call home.

Beneath the earth, however, things look even stranger: a network of caves, connected into what used to be entire subterranean cities. Derinkuyu, in southern Cappadocia, was once home to as many as 20,000 residents living together underground. There's a huge bathhouse, complete with a set of private rooms and tall ceilings to allow steam to rise, all of it ventilated by a system of shafts that run for dozens of kilometres in every direction – sometimes a vast distance from the populated areas to trick potential invaders.

Long abandoned, the underground cities of Cappadocia have rather suddenly been rediscovered: by the produce industry. The constant underground temperature of about 13C make the caves an ideal storage climate for thousands of tonnes of fruit and vegetables: apples, cabbage and cauliflower stay fresh for up to four weeks; citrus fruits, pears and potatoes for months. In a cave near the village of Ortahisar, nearly 6m crates of lemons sit in endless stacks. They arrive from Turkey’s Mediterranean coast on trucks and are unloaded by hand. Labourers – mostly women – package and stack the fruit, which then is stored underground until it is needed for export to Europe, Russia and elsewhere.

Potatoes stored in the Cappadocia caves can stay fresh for many months. Photograph: Ali Kabas/Alamy

Okan Yazgan, who runs the Aravan Evi hotel here, has taken advantage. “We have a cave store with a capacity of 100 tonnes, but we do not have a large enough area for growing potatoes. So we rent our store space,” he said. The potatoes are stored underground and sold in situ when prices increase during winter and spring, Yazgan added.

The volcanic rock of these underground cities is moist and soft to the touch – a car key or pen easily leaves a mark – and the walls carry the marks of its former residents. Small ridges can be seen on the walls and ceilings, made as long as 3,500 years ago by the first people to realise that they could chisel out a home here. They liked living underground for much of the same reason that the produce vendors do: when visiting Cappadocia in 400 BC, Xenophon, a student of Socrates, reported seeing goats, sheep, cows and poultry fed on straw and hay. “Corn, rice, vegetables and barley beer was stored in large pots,” he wrote...Continue Reading

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