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Derinkuyu ("deep well") (Cappadocian Greek: Μαλακοπή; Latin: Malacopia) is a town in Nevşehir Province in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey. It is the seat of Derinkuyu District. İlçe Belediyesi, Turkey Civil Administration Departments Inventory. Retrieved 22 May 2023. Its population is 10,912 (2022). The elevation is .
The geomorphology of the area lends itself to underground construction. The soil is generally dry, and the tuff rock typical of the area is easy to work.
The city contained food stores, kitchens, stalls, churches, wine and oil presses, ventilation shafts, wells, and a religious school. The Derinkuyu underground city has at least eight levels constructed to a depth of and could have sheltered thousands of people.
From Byzantine times (4th century CE) through 1923 Derinkuyu was known by its Cappadocian Greek inhabitants as Malakopea ().Peter Mackridge, "Some Pamphlets on Dead Greek Dialects': R.M. Dawkins and Modern Greek Dialectology", 1990. p. 205. "Anyone who attempts to find the Greek villages of Cappadocia today, either on the map or on the ground, is first faced by the problem that their names have been obliterated, a chauvinistic practice not only prevalent in modern Turkey, but practiced in Greece as well. Visitors to the so-called 'underground cities' at Kaymakli and Derinkuyu have difficulty in ascertaining that until 1923 they were called Anaku and Malakopi respectively (the latter being the Μαλακοπαία of Theophanes. Once located, however, these villages bear obvious traces of their Greek Christian past in the shape of sizable churches (some of which have been converted into mosques and are therefore well preserved, but with their frescoes covered with whitewash), and a number of rather elegant houses, whose Greekness is betrayed only by the initials and dates (usually about ten years before the 1923 exchange of populations." The underground city was greatly expanded in the middle Byzantine period to serve as a refuge from the raids of the Umayyad Arabs and Abbasid armies, during the Arab–Byzantine wars (780-1180). The city continued to be used as protection from the Mongols incursions of Timur in the 14th century. After the region fell to the Ottoman Turks the cities were used as refuges (Greek: καταφύγια). As late as the 20th century the town's inhabitants, called Cappadocian Greeks, were still using the underground chambers to escape periodic waves of Ottoman persecution.
The Cambridge linguist Dawkins, who spent time in the towns from 1910-1911 while writing his book on Cappadocian Greek, wrote:
When the Cappadocian Greeks were required to leave in 1923 in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the tunnels were finally abandoned.
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