YouTube transcript (rbbHjdr8TQ4) — Transcript

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1. 0:00This underground city was discovered
2. 0:02because of just one animal. It happened
3. 0:05in 1963.
4. 0:06The man lived in Cappadocia in a house
5. 0:09of soft rock. Behind the house, the man
6. 0:12kept animals, but one by one his animals
7. 0:15began disappearing. Nothing was ever
8. 0:17found. No tracks, no feathers. Then one
9. 0:20day he saw a chicken slip away. The
10. 0:23chicken squeezed through a crack in his
11. 0:25basement wall. The man hurried down and
12. 0:27pulled the crack wider. Behind the wall
13. 0:30was a room he had never seen. And from
14. 0:32that room stairs dropped into the dark.
15. 0:35The stairs kept going far below his
16. 0:37house. At last, the giant city Derinkuyu
17. 0:40revealed itself to the world. Months
18. 0:42later, digging teams excavated the whole
19. 0:45city. And what the teams found was
20. 0:47shocking. The city could hold 20,000
21. 0:49people. 18 levels stretched 85 meters
22. 0:53down. Hundreds of rooms were found in
23. 0:55the rock. Beyond plain homes, the city
24. 0:57had a school for children, wine presses,
25. 1:00cellars, even a church waited below. So
26. 1:03why did 20,000 people live underground?
27. 1:05In the 700s, Arab armies began raiding
28. 1:08Cappadocia.
29. 1:09They burned villages and carried off
30. 1:11loot and people. Yes, Derinkuyu was
31. 1:14exactly that hiding place. But people
32. 1:17below still needed clean air to breathe.
33. 1:19So the builders carved air shafts
34. 1:21through the rock. The openings never
35. 1:23line up from floor to floor. So air
36. 1:25drifts room to room, never straight out.
37. 1:28And one deep shaft let its people draw
38. 1:30water below. Derinkuyu means deep well,
39. 1:34named for the well that shaft reached.
40. 1:36And so people endured below for over a
41. 1:38thousand years. In 1985, UNESCO made
42. 1:41Derinkuyu, the city a chicken had found,
43. 1:44a world heritage site. Today, visitors
44. 1:46can walk down only eight levels. The
45. 1:49rest still waits in darkness, ready for
46. 1:51invaders.