Five settlements that answered the same problem — killing heat, hard winters, no timber worth building with — by cutting their rooms straight into the ground. Sandstone, clay, volcanic ash and tuff: soft enough to work with a pick, firm enough to hold a ceiling up.
About half the town lives below ground in 'dugouts' — rooms driven sideways into the sandstone, where the rock holds a steady 23°C or so all year and nobody needs an air conditioner. Many were dug by miners who simply kept tunnelling after the opal ran out, and the standard way to add a bedroom is still to mine one. The 70-odd opal fields around the town supply most of the world's gem-quality opal.
The pit houses were barely known to the outside world until 22 days of rain in 1969 flooded and collapsed many of them. The government laid out a new town on the plain some 15 km north — and most families rebuilt underground instead. The pit hotel used for those film scenes is still trading, and still dressed as the Lars homestead.
Some 2,000 cave houses honeycomb the clay hills on the town's edge, several thousand people living in them — one of the largest inhabited cave quarters in Europe. The clay is nearly impermeable and easy to cut, and holds the rooms at a steady 18–20°C whether it is 40°C or below zero outside; a family extends the house by digging one more room off the back.
Cave homes have been cut here since at least the third century, and probably long before — pillared tombs from Roman times still stand among the houses. The pale rock is ash and pumice thrown out by the big Cappadocian volcanoes: soft enough to hollow out with a hand pick, firm enough that a farmer's storeroom and a monk's painted chapel have both outlasted everything ever built on the surface here. The dwellings families moved out of now trade as cave hotels.
Around 450 people were still living here at the last census, in 151 households. The karaans are cut from non-welded ignimbrite — ash-flow tuff laid down over 100 metres deep by eruptions of Mount Sahand, then eroded into cones by water; the grooves the water carved are now the village lanes, and the tallest cones run 30 to 40 metres. The thick walls stay cool through the summer and hold heat through the winter, and the village lives largely on day-trippers driving up from Tabriz.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.