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Alarge number of artifacts belonging to the second and third centuries A.D. were unearthed in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors in southeastern Mardin province’s Midyat district. Midyat, which is almost an open-air museum with its history and culture, offers a magical atmosphere to its visitors with stone houses, inns, mosques, churches and monasteries that are thousands of years old. In the district, a cave was found within the scope of a project started two years ago for cleaning and conservation of the historical streets and houses. After it was determined that...

Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum. The news was reported by Lorenzo d'Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained. This "new discovery" from the pre-classical age which "needs to be continued" in southern...

This image released by the Diputacion Floral de Bizkaia on Friday May 27, 2016, shows a cave drawing. Spanish archaeologists say they have discovered an exceptional set of Paleolithic-era cave drawings that could rank among the best in a country that already boasts some of the world's most important cave art. Chief site archaeologist Diego Garate said Friday that an estimated 70 drawings were found on ledges 300 meters (1,000 feet) underground in the Atxurra cave, Berriatua, in the northern Basque region. He described the site as being in "the Champions' League" of cave art, among the top 10 sites...

One of the greatest engineering achievements of ancient times is a water tunnel, 1,036 meters (4,000 feet) long, excavated through a mountain on the Greek island of Samos in the sixth century B.C. It was dug through solid limestone by two separate teams advancing in a straight line from both ends, using only picks, hammers, and chisels. This was a prodigious feat of manual labor. The intellectual feat of determining the direction of tunneling was equally impressive. How did they do this? No one knows for sure, because no written records exist. When the tunnel was dug, the Greeks had...

Archeologists have found an ancient underground town in Kyparissia in Greece during a local construction work. According to Katerina Nikolas, a columnist for helium.com, recently some local road works were being carried out near a swimming pool in the city and something unusual caused them to stop their work immediately. It appeared that an ancient underground town had been discovered on the site, which archeologists are now excavating. Interestingly some parts of the ancient town are higher than the depths of the swimming pool nearby, meaning that when the land was purchased and the swimming pool built, the owner must...

Seemingly by coincidence I stumbled upon a book entitled Field Guide to Mysterious Places of Eastern North America by Salvatore M. Trento, an Oxford grad. In his book he gives information on 3 underground tunnels outside of Ellenville, NY. He also mentions the presence of 20 circular pits outside of Pine Bush... Unlike the pits, there is no supported explanation as of yet for the tunnels. The author speculates that they were carved by Dutch miners in search of a mineral vein. No records exist of the tunnels and no local historians know how they came to be... The main...

The rediscovery of an ancient underground city in Turkey a few years ago was an exciting find—the very kind of exciting find that the internet eats up. The 5,000-year-old cave villa, found in the city of Nevşehir, is fairly huge, with approximately 3.5 miles of tunnels, and dozens of rooms making up churches, tombs, and other safe spaces. In comments to National Geographic, Nevşehir Mayor Hasan Ünver noted that there was a bit of a paper trail that went back hundreds of years, but not one that implied that there was an entire city in the area. "We found documents...

In desperate circumstances people are often driven to perform feats of mythical proportions. In the late 1100s the medieval kingdom of Georgia was resisting the onslaught of the Mongol hordes, the most devastating force Europe had ever seen. Queen Tamar ordered the construction of this underground sanctuary in 1185, and the digging began, carving into the side of the Erusheli mountain, located in the south of the country near the town of Aspindza. When completed this underground fortress extended 13 levels and contained 6000 apartments, a throne room and a large church with an external bell tower. It is assumed...

A new aerial video has provided a rare glimpse into a mysterious Chinese village where residents have lived in subterranean 'pit yards' for some four millennia. The series of underground dwellings in central China's Henan Province used to have nearly 10,000 homes. Right now, around 3,000 people still live there while the others have moved to modern homes, according to Chinese media.

A monastery hewn from the rock has been found during excavations and cleaning works in an underground city that was discovered in 2014 in the Central Anatolian province of Nevsehir... Excavation and cleaning works have been continuing on an area of 400,000 square meters that includes 11 neighborhoods around Nevsehir Castle, which is situated in the city center and has been declared a third-degree archaeological area. At the beginning of the year, a historic church was discovered in the underground city. The church features frescoes depicting the ascension of Jesus to heaven as well as other important objects for the...

Last February, archaeologists unearthed a unique rock-carved underground church in Nevsehir, in the central Turkish region of Cappadocia. The church was decorated with never before seen frescoes depicting Jesus’ Ascension, the Final Judgement, Jesus feeding the multitudes, and portraits of saints and prophets.The discovery, made during excavations and cleaning operations in an underground city recently uncovered as part of an urban project in Nevsehir, is located within a castle that might date back to the fifth century. Authorities expect it will make Cappadocia an even more important pilgrimage center for Orthodox Christians. Semih İstanbulluoğlu, the archaeologist who heads the works for...

It's not the first underground city to be discovered in the region; there are some 250 known subterranean dwellings of various sizes hidden within the fantastical landscape. The two biggest are Kaymakli and Derinkuyu; the latter is estimated to have been able to house up to 20,000 people. Both cities have been known for decades. But this new underground town, hiding beneath a centuries-old castle on a hilltop right in NevÅŸehir, just might be the biggest. One early estimate by geophysicists put its area at nearly five million square feet and its depth at 371 feet. If those estimates are...

New details have been revealed about the massive ancient underground city discovered in Turkey's Central Anatolian province of Nevsehir. The tunnels of the underground city are located under a conical-shaped hill and are wide enough for a car to pass through. Ozcan Cakir, associate professor at the Geophysics Engineering department of the 18 March University and involved in the excavations of the underground city, said they believe the tunnels were used to carry agricultural products. "We believe that people, who were engaged in agriculture, were using the tunnels to carry agricultural products to the city. We also estimate that one...

A home owner living in the Melikgazi district of Kayseri province in Anatolia made a surprising discovery while clearing out an area under his house – a subterranean city, of which 4,000 square metres have been excavated so far, according to a report in Hurriyet Daily News. The region of Anatolia in Turkey is famous for its underground cities, particularly in the region of Cappadocia where more than 40 complete underground cities and 200 underground villages and tunnel towns complete with hidden passages, secret rooms, and ancient temples have been found. Mustafa Bozdemir, 50, was bequeathed a house in Melikgazi...

Remember the two underground cities we visited south of the "central" Cappadocia area? We headed off in that direction, but instead of going to the same ones because they're now just another parking lot crowded with white tour buses, we turned east to explore a town called Guzulyurt. It means beautiful home and is mentioned in Lonely Planet as also having an underground city and church frescoes, but much less visited because it's a little out of the way. What a delight. Drove through some very stark landscape that at times reminded me of our long sweeps through the emptier...

In 1963, an inhabitant of Derinkuyu (in the region of Cappadocia, central Anatolia, Turkey), knocking down a wall of his house cave, discovered amazed that behind it was a mysterious room that he had never seen, and this led him room to another and another and another to it ... By chance he had discovered the underground city of Derinkuyu, whose first level could be excavated by the Hittites around 1400 BC Archaeologists began to explore this fascinating underground city abandoned. It managed to forty meters deep, but is believed to have a fund of up to 85 meters. At...

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- Some Leavenworth residents have been unknowingly walking around above an underground city, and no one seems to know who created it or why. Windows, doors and narrow paths beneath a title company at South Fourth and Delaware streets lead to storefronts stretching several city blocks and perhaps beyond.

Inside the amazing cave city that housed 25,000 Allied troops under German noses in WWIBy ROBERT HARDMAN - More by this author » Last updated at 11:53am on 15th March 2008  The wax is still melted on to the chalk pillar which served as an Easter Sunday altar for the men of the Suffolk Regiment more than 90 years ago.   Old helmets are scattered around the floor. A heap of cans, including a tin of Turnwrights Toffee Delight, lies alongside a collection of old stone jars - flagons of rum, perhaps, to numb the fear of the battle ahead....

By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers. Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their...

A whole underground city exists under Sofia streets. Hundreds of kilometers of tunnels spread under the capital. Some of them are so big that buses can pass through them. Nowadays the catacombs host thousands of clochards. Witnesses say, ten to twenty thousand people live there. "These figures are unrealistic," said Sofia Mayor Boyko Borissov but he could give the exact number of the homeless living in the tunnels Jordan Todorov says: "I was surprised to learn recently about the underground tunnel in Mexico. Exactly at the same time some Bulgarian newspapers published simmilar kind of stories. "According to Standart daily...