The World Without Us

All that remained of it when Mellaart began digging was a low mound rising above wheat and barley fields. The first things he found were hundreds of obsidian points, which may explain the black spots, as the Hasan Dağ volcano was the source for that substance. But for reasons unknown, Çatal Höyük had been abandoned. The mud-brick walls of its house-sized boxes had fallen in on themselves, and erosion smoothed the rectangles of its skyline into a gentle parabola. Another 9,000 years, and the parabola should be long flattened.

On Hasan Dağ’s opposite slope, however, something quite different happened. What is now called Cappadocia began as a lake. During millions of years of frequent volcanic eruptions, its bowl filled with layers of ash that kept piling on, hundreds of feet deep. When the cauldron finally cooled, these congealed into tuff, a rock with remarkable properties.

A huge, final burst 2 million years ago unrolled a mantle of lava that left a thin crust of basalt atop 10,000 square miles of powdery gray tuff. When it hardened, so did the climate. Rain, wind, and snow set to work, with freeze-thaw cycles cracking and splitting the basalt pavement, and moisture seeping in to dissolve the tuff below. As it eroded, in places the ground collapsed. Left standing were hundreds of pale, slender pinnacles, each mushroom-capped with a hood of darker basalt.

Tourism promoters call them fairy towers, a plausible descriptor but not necessarily the first one that comes to mind. The magical version prevails, however, because the surrounding tuff hills have invited not just wind and water to sculpt them, but also the hands of imaginative humans. Cappadocia’s towns have not been built so much on the land, as in it.

Tuff is soft enough that a determined prisoner here could scoop his way out of a dungeon with a spoon. When exposed to air, however, it hardens, forming a smooth, stucco-like shell. By 700 BC, humans with iron tools were burrowing into Cappadocia’s escarpments, and even hollowing out fairy towers. Like a prairie dog village tipped on its side, every rock face was soon riddled with holes—some big enough for a pigeon, or a person, or a three-floor hotel.

The pigeonholes—hundreds of thousands of arched niches hollowed into valley walls and pinnacles—were intended to attract rock doves for exactly the same reason humans in modern cities try to chase their urban cousins away: their copious droppings. So prized was pigeon guano, used here to nourish grapes, potatoes, and famously sweet apricots, that the carved exteriors of many dovecotes bear flourishes as ornate as those found on Cappadocia’s cave churches. This architectural homage to a feathered fellow creature continued until artificial fertilizers reached here in the 1950s. Since then, Cappadocians no longer build them. (Nor do they now build churches. Before the Ottomans converted Turkey to Islam, more than 700 were cut into Cappadocia’s plateaus and mountainsides.)

Much of today’s most expensive real estate here consists of luxury homes carved into tuff, with bas-relief exteriors as pretentious as the facades of mansions anywhere, and with mountainside views to match. Former churches have been recast into mosques; the muezzin call to evening devotion, resounding among Cappadocia’s slick tuff walls and spires, is like a congregation of mountains praying.

One distant day, these man-made caves—and even natural ones, of stone much harder than volcanic tuff—will wear away. In Cappadocia, however, the stamp of humanity’s passage will linger beyond our other traces, because here humans have not only ensconced themselves in plateau walls, but also beneath the plains. Deep beneath. Should the Earth’s poles shift and sheet glaciers one day muscle their way across central Turkey, flattening whatever man-made structures still stand in their way, here they will only scratch our surface.

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning a back room of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archaeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people—and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.