DISCOVERY 



140 



tliat the houses have existed above ground much longer 

 than the church, which was built in 1S44. 



The entrances to the subterranean dwelhngs are in 

 every case inside private houses. Your host takes you 

 into his back premises, which extend themselves into 

 an aperture like an enlarged rabbit-hole down which 

 it is necessary to crawl upon hands and knees until the 

 entry proper to the settlement is reached. This is 

 marked by a recess at the side of the passage in which 

 there is a mill-stone. From an inner chamber this 

 stone can be rolled into position, completely blocking 

 the passage ; only the central hole of the mill-stone 

 remains, and through this a rifle can be fired. " From 

 inside we used to shoot with a gun thorough the hole 

 in the mill-stone and shoot the Turks," said a modern 



villages, we were told, had taken refuge underground 

 at the time of the Adana massacres. I can only hope 

 that their cities of refuge may have enabled some of 

 these Christians to survive the Great War. For with 

 a sufficient supply of food they should be impregnable, 

 except to blasting operations, for an indefinite period. 

 Not less interesting are two series of rock-cut 

 dwellings above ground. The material of the Cappa- 

 docian plateau appears to consist of a very soft volcanic 

 tufa with a thin protecting layer of harder rock on top. 

 At two places there are cracks in this covering, and in 

 these valleys the soft rock thus exposed has shown 

 itself equally plastic to the agency of nature and the 

 hand of man. One of them I have not had the good 

 fortune to visit ; the other, which runs from two masses 



Fig. 2.— rock DWKI.I.IXGS, UTCH I11>.SAK 



informant, and in the Middle Ages a captain of Timour 

 Beg, who was sent to hunt out the cave-dwellers of 

 this district, was shol with an arrow in similar 

 fashion. 



Beyond the mill-stone is a series of dwelling-rooms, 

 churches, and store-houses (that below Misti is reputed 

 to contain as many as 400 dwellings), and the whole 

 honeycomb is grouped round the village well, which 

 in this waterless area is often very deep. Suvermcs, 

 " water is lacking," the Turkish name of one of these 

 villages, tells its own tale, and at another, Malakopi, the 

 level of the water is about seventy metres below the 

 ground. The burrowed habitations are also carried to 

 a considerable depth. At Malakopi there are no less 

 than five series one below the other and each defended 

 by a mill-stone door. 



These subterranean warrens are called KaTa<f>vyia, 

 " places of refuge," and the greater part of one of the 



of rock called Utch Hissar, " Three Castles," by the 

 village of Matchan, the ancient Matiane, is the most 

 remarkable natural spectacle I have seen. The rocks 

 at Utch Hissar, thrown up perhaps by some volcanic 

 agency, were honeycombed at some date unknown by 

 human inhabitants. Weathering has now stripped the 

 outer surface of the rock, and the oblong niches to be 

 seen in Fig. 2 are rooms the outer walls of which 

 have dropped away. 



But more remarkable still is the valley at the head of 

 which these masses of rock are placed. Here the absence 

 of the hard integument has left the soft stone bare and 

 nature has weathered it into a series of fantastic cones. 

 Looking down the valley, one sees them not in tens but 

 in hundreds. To add to the bizarre effect, their colour 

 no less than their shape is unreal. Some are yellowish- 

 white, some pink, some black, and some a dirty red. 

 It is not unlike the mountain scenery in one of Giotto's 



