Guide
Kırkgöz is in the town of Saratlı in the Gülağaç district of Aksaray. The first Christians took refuge in Cappadocia to escape Roman persecution and built underground cities here to survive the fighting, living in them together for a week at a time, sometimes a month, until the danger passed.
The city is thought to have seven levels. It has forty rooms in all, with a lavatory, a bathing room and a store. Unlike its counterparts elsewhere in Cappadocia it has a ventilation system: shafts brought down the air that was needed. Security doors cut from millstones slide from the inside and are shaped so that anyone coming from outside cannot work out how they open. Water came from wells and cisterns within, bread was baked communally, and light came from lamps burning olive oil or tail fat.
At the entrance is a space used as a stable with fourteen feeding troughs, and a second room past it where seven more were found. Tunnels lead up to the second level and a water well ten metres deep, with a ventilation shaft above it and a tandır cut into the floor beside it. Another space beyond this holds three rooms, and the tunnels running off in different directions from there were left unfinished.
From the second level a sloping tunnel descends to the third and into the room with the well known as the kuyulu dam, with one room to the right of the well and two to the left. This was an important place to live in the Roman period, on the Silk Road and at the entrance to Cappadocia. It is well preserved and easy to walk through; three of its levels have been cleared and opened. Not far away, the underground city and church of Saint Mercurius is another site of the same kind.
