We often wonder what ancient cities looked like, what buildings, walls, and colors did they feature. But rarely do we ask: What did they sound like?
In truth, few cities (if any) sounded like Derinkuyu.
The Ancient City of Derinkuyu
In a cavernous warren beneath the Turkish plains, the ancient underground city of Derinkuyu once buzzed with the sounds of daily life. For centuries, footsteps echoed in narrow stone halls and the low murmur of voices rose through air shafts.
Now, thousands of years after those voices went silent, one researcher is trying to bring them back.
Derinkuyu is the largest excavated underground city in the world. It lies beneath the parched volcanic terrain of Cappadocia and extends more than 85 meters deep. Archaeologists suspect it spanned 18 levels and out of them, only 8 were even discovered. Truly, it was a marvel of ancient engineering.
At its peak, the city could accommodate up to 20,000 people and had advanced, specialized facilities like wine presses, stables, and even churches. It was built by the Phrygians, an ancient Indo-European people who settled in central Anatolia around the 8th century BC, but it was used all the way to the Byzantines, and even afterward as a refuge. Then, in Roman times, Christians used and expanded it, building the churches we see today.
City goes brr
Archaeologists are spending a lot of time and effort trying to uncover the remaining layers of Derinkuyu. But Sezin Nas, a researcher in interior architecture and acoustics at Istanbul Galata University, is doing a different type of exploration. He wants to figure out what the city sounded like.
“There is a notable gap in the literature regarding the acoustic environment and soundscape of underground cities,” Nas said. “Studying the Derinkuyu underground city aimed to contribute both to the preservation of cultural heritage and to provide data that could inform the design of future underground urban spaces.”
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At the 188th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this May, Nas presented a project that reconstructs Derinkuyu’s lost soundscape. In so doing, he digitally revived the city’s auditory life through an immersive 3D model.
How do you bring sound to life?
Nas focused her study on three key types of spaces: a church, a living area, and a kitchen. These weren’t chosen at random. Each reveals different layers of life and community — and each had their own acoustic fingerprint.
To digitally simulate the city’s acoustics, she mapped out each room’s geometry, estimated the materials’ reverberation properties, and imagined the likely sources of sound. Layer by layer, she recreated a soundscape of ancient life — an echo of a world long gone. And listeners could now experience it through headphones.
But perhaps most remarkable is how sound traveled in the city. Derinkuyu’s ventilation shafts — over 50,000 of them — did more than circulate air. They carried voices.
“The integration of ventilation and communication functions within the same architectural elements is considered one of Derinkuyu’s most unique features,” Nas said. “This multifunctional use of the ventilation system strongly highlights the exceptional construction process of the site and plays a central role in shaping its soundscape.”
The work is still incipient. We don’t know for sure whether voices traveled clearly from floor to floor in Derinkuyu, but there is plausible evidence that the architectural design could have allowed for some level of acoustic communication between levels
“This research also highlights the role of historical sound environments as an important and often overlooked component of cultural heritage,” Nas said.
The more this work progresses, the closer we get to truly recreating an ancient city; not just its look, but also its sounds.