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FREE SAMPLE5 minÇatalhöyük, the Town With No Streets
Catalhoyuk — The Painted Walls, How Much of This Did the Digger Draw
This is the part of Çatalhöyük you have already seen before you arrived, even if you have never heard the name. A small clay figure of a heavy seated woman, her hands resting on two big cats, the famous one found in a grain bin. Red geometric panels. A leaping leopard. And a strange aerial pattern of boxes beneath a spotted, erupting mountain that a thousand books call the oldest map in the world, a Neolithic town painted with the volcano above it. These images made this site mean something. And the most famous of them carries its own unresolved fight, one the caption cards rarely admit. Not everyone agrees the oldest map in the world is a map at all. In 2006 the archaeologist Stephanie Meece argued the boxes are a common geometric wall pattern and the spotted mountain above them is a stretched leopard skin, a motif this site painted constantly; on that reading there is no town, no volcano, no map, just decoration seen through modern eyes hungry for a first. In 2014 a team led by Axel Schmitt answered with dates: pumice from Hasan Dag showed the volcano erupted within the painting's lifetime, close enough for painters to have watched the mountain burn. Map or leopard skin, eyewitness record or wishful caption, the plaster itself will not say. The question is how much of this site's meaning was found here, and how much was supplied.
Web preview is capped at this single free stop. On-location free stops, offline listening, and route guidance stay inside the app.
City context
What this tour is really about
Turkey holds some of the oldest human stories on Earth. This self-guided audio tour takes you into Cappadocia's Derinkuyu, an underground city carved deep enough to hide thousands, and through Ephesus, the Library of Celsus, the lone surviving column of the Temple of Artemis, the terrace houses of the Roman elite, and the great theater where a riot nearly changed history. We keep the archaeology separate from the legend.
Tour chapters
Episodes, stops, and routes
Cappadocia, derinkuyu Underground City
24 min audio
5 episodes
In central Turkey, beneath the surreal landscape of fairy chimneys and cave dwellings, lies something even stranger: underground cities capable of sheltering 20,000 people or more, carved from volcanic tuff over millennia.
01FREE PREVIEW5 min
Cappadocia — Derinkuyu, the City That Goes Down Eighty-Five Meters
In 1963, in this town, a man renovating his house knocked through a basement wall and found a room he had not built. Behind the room, a passage. Behind the passage, more rooms, stairways corkscrewing down into the dark, and by the time the surveys stopped counting, the city under his floor dropped about eighty-five meters, held as many as eighteen levels, and could have sheltered something like twenty thousand people with their animals, their food, and their water for months. Its name is Derinkuyu. It means deep well. You are standing at the mouth of the deepest underground city ever found.
Derinkuyu Underground City, Nevşehir Province
02FREE PREVIEW5 min
Cappadocia — The Ventilation Shafts, the Engineering You Cannot See
Take a breath here, deep underground, and notice that you can. The air you just drew in traveled through a system designed more than a thousand years ago, and without it you would not last the afternoon. Of everything carved into this rock, the cleverest part is the part you cannot see.
Derinkuyu ventilation shafts, Nevşehir Province
03FREE PREVIEW4 min
Cappadocia — The Rolling Stone Doors, Fear Made Physical
Somewhere below where you stand, a family once waited in the dark on the far side of a stone like this one and listened to the men who had come for them scraping at it. That is what this door is for. Look at it: a wheel of grey rock taller than a cartwheel, one to one and a half meters across, about a hand's length thick, resting in a carved slot beside the passage. It weighs around half a ton. When trouble came down the stairs, the people inside rolled it across the tunnel mouth, and the city closed like an eye.
Derinkuyu Stone Door Mechanism, Nevşehir Province
04FREE PREVIEW5 min
Cappadocia — Kaymaklı, the City at the Other End of the Tunnel
Drive about nine kilometers north of Derinkuyu and you arrive at its sister. Kaymaklı is the other great underground city of this plateau, and the moment you step inside, the difference is in your body. Derinkuyu drives straight down, narrow and deep. Kaymaklı spreads out. It is shallower, the open floors reaching maybe forty meters, but wider, its low passages built like spokes around the ventilation chimneys, so you find yourself crouching sideways through tunnels that branch and rejoin instead of plunging.
Kaymaklı Underground City, Nevşehir Province
05FREE PREVIEW5 min
Cappadocia — The Dark Church, Saved by Pigeons and the Lack of Light
North of the underground cities, the ground above changes its mind and erupts upward into cones and spires of soft rock, and the monks of Cappadocia carved their churches into them. In the Göreme valley, climb the steps to the one they call the Karanlık Kilise, the Dark Church. The name is a warning and a gift. There is only one small window, high up, and the room stays dim.
Karanlık Kilise (Dark Church), Göreme Open Air Museum, Nevşehir Province
Çatalhöyük, the Town With No Streets
27 min audio
6 episodes
On the Konya plain, a low double mound holds one of the largest settlements humanity had built by 7400 BCE, a town of several thousand people with no streets at all. The houses were packed wall to wall, entered through holes in the roof, replastered almost every year, with the dead buried under the floors where the living slept.
01FREE PREVIEW4 min
Catalhoyuk — Çatalhöyük, the Town With No Streets
You are looking at a low double mound in the Konya plain, wheat on every side, and it does not look like the beginning of anything. But around 7400 BCE, as many as several thousand people lived here, in one of the largest settlements humanity had yet built. This quiet hill is one of the main reasons we still argue about how civilization began.
Çatalhöyük East Mound, Konya Province
02FREE PREVIEW5 min
Catalhoyuk — The History Houses, Living on Top of the Dead
Stand at the rail of the shelter and look down into the cut. What you see is not a town as you would draw one. There are no streets, no squares, no obvious temple. There are only rooms, hundreds of them, packed against each other like cells in a honeycomb, walls shared, no space between. To enter one of these houses nine thousand years ago you climbed onto the roofs, walked across the rooftops of your neighbors, and dropped down a wooden ladder through a hole in the ceiling that also vented the smoke of your hearth. The town was a single connected surface, and people moved across the top of it.
Çatalhöyük East Mound, excavation shelter, Konya Province
03FREE PREVIEW4 min
Catalhoyuk — The Wall That May Be the Oldest Map
In 1963, James Mellaart uncovered a wall painting at Çatalhöyük that has been argued over ever since. It is a band of small rectangles, packed together, stacked and offset, and above them a shape with two peaks, dotted all over and trailing what look like sparks or falling debris. Mellaart read it immediately and confidently. The rectangles, he said, were the houses of Çatalhöyük itself, seen from above, a plan of the very town you are standing in. The twin-peaked shape was Hasan Dağ, the volcano you can see on a clear day to the northeast, shown in eruption. If he was right, this is the oldest known map and the oldest known landscape painting in the world, made around 6600 BCE.
Çatalhöyük East Mound, wall-painting displays
04FREE PREVIEW5 min
Catalhoyuk — The Painted Walls, How Much of This Did the Digger Draw
This is the part of Çatalhöyük you have already seen before you arrived, even if you have never heard the name. A small clay figure of a heavy seated woman, her hands resting on two big cats, the famous one found in a grain bin. Red geometric panels. A leaping leopard. And a strange aerial pattern of boxes beneath a spotted, erupting mountain that a thousand books call the oldest map in the world, a Neolithic town painted with the volcano above it. These images made this site mean something. And the most famous of them carries its own unresolved fight, one the caption cards rarely admit. Not everyone agrees the oldest map in the world is a map at all. In 2006 the archaeologist Stephanie Meece argued the boxes are a common geometric wall pattern and the spotted mountain above them is a stretched leopard skin, a motif this site painted constantly; on that reading there is no town, no volcano, no map, just decoration seen through modern eyes hungry for a first. In 2014 a team led by Axel Schmitt answered with dates: pumice from Hasan Dag showed the volcano erupted within the painting's lifetime, close enough for painters to have watched the mountain burn. Map or leopard skin, eyewitness record or wishful caption, the plaster itself will not say. The question is how much of this site's meaning was found here, and how much was supplied.
Çatalhöyük East Mound, wall-painting and figurine displays, Konya Province
05FREE PREVIEW4 min
Catalhoyuk — The Dead Beneath the Floor
At Çatalhöyük, the dead did not leave the house. There was no cemetery, no separate ground for the buried. Instead, under the raised platforms where the living slept and worked, archaeologists keep finding graves. Bodies were placed in pits cut into the floor of the home, then plastered over, and life went on above them. Some houses hold a handful of burials. A few hold dozens. You slept, every night, on a floor that was also a tomb.
Çatalhöyük East Mound, excavation shelter
06FREE PREVIEW5 min
Catalhoyuk — The Experimental House, and Why Çatalhöyük Breaks the Story
Near the shelters that cover the excavation trenches stands a full-size house, rebuilt from scratch. The Çatalhöyük team raised it as an experiment, using the materials and methods the evidence points to: mudbrick walls, timber posts, a flat roof, an entry hole in the ceiling with a ladder reaching down, a hearth and oven against one wall, raised platforms around the edges. Climb the ladder and drop in through the roof, the way every resident did for fifteen hundred years, and the strangeness of this town becomes physical. There is no front door. There is no street outside to have a door onto.
Çatalhöyük experimental house, East Mound
Ephesus, the City That Worshipped a Goddess
17 min audio
4 episodes
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stood here, the Temple of Artemis, four times the size of the Parthenon. Ephesus was a great Roman port city of the province of Asia, where Paul preached and triggered a riot because Christianity threatened the souvenir trade, where the Virgin Mary is traditionally said to have spent her last years, and where the dead were honored with a library wrapped around a tomb. The city eventually died the way harbor cities do, slowly, as the river silted the bay and the sea retreated kilometers away, leaving the marble standing in a plain.
01FREE PREVIEW4 min
Ephesus — The Library of Celsus, Knowledge, Death, and a Secret Tunnel to the Brothel
The midday sun off the marble at the end of Curetes Street is the kind of light that turns stone to bone. You stand where Marble Road meets the Tetragonos Agora and the facade of the Library of Celsus is in front of you, two tiers of columns, four statues set in their niches, the heat coming off the pavement in a slow shimmer. Tiberius Iulius Aquila Polemaeanus built this in the early second century AD for his father, Tiberius Iulius Celsus Polemaeanus, Roman senator and former proconsul of Asia around 105 to 107 CE.
The Library of Celsus, Ephesus, Turkey
02FREE PREVIEW5 min
Ephesus — The Temple of Artemis, The Wonder That Became a Single Column
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stands about two kilometers from the main Ephesus ruins. It's a single reconstructed column rising from a marshy field, with a stork's nest on top.
The Temple of Artemis, Ephesus, Turkey
03FREE PREVIEW4 min
Ephesus — The Terrace Houses, How the Roman One Percent Actually Lived
Forget the temples. Forget the theaters. If you want to understand what life in the ancient world actually felt like, walk through the terrace houses.
The Terrace Houses, Ephesus, Turkey
04FREE PREVIEW4 min
Ephesus — The Great Theater, Where a Riot Almost Killed Christianity
Twenty-five thousand people were screaming the same words for two hours straight. "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" Over and over. The sound filling this massive bowl of stone, echoing off the hillside, drowning out everything else.
The Great Theater, Ephesus, Turkey
Istanbul, Faith Painted Over
15 min audio
3 episodes
When Constantinople fell in 1453 and its great church became a mosque, the Christian faces on the walls were not smashed. They were plastered over. The Hagia Sophia's golden mosaics stayed hidden in plain sight for almost five hundred years, glimpsed and re-buried once in the nineteenth century, uncovered for good in the twentieth, and partly veiled again in 2020.
01FREE PREVIEW5 min
Istanbul — Hagia Sophia, the Faces Behind the Plaster
Stand in the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia, away from the crowds beneath the dome, and find the panel they call the Deesis. Christ in the center, the Virgin and John the Baptist turned toward him, their faces worked in glass and gold so fine the skin looks lit from inside. It is one of the greatest mosaics in the world. For almost five hundred years, no one could see it. It had been buried under plaster, on a wall in plain sight.
Hagia Sophia, Sultanahmet, Istanbul
02FREE PREVIEW5 min
Istanbul — The Basilica Cistern, the Goddess Who Holds Up the Roof
Go down the stairs into the Basilica Cistern and let your eyes adjust. You are under the city now, in a flooded stone hall the size of a cathedral, three hundred and thirty-six columns standing in shallow water, each one lit from below, their reflections doubling the forest downward into the black. The emperor Justinian had this reservoir built in the sixth century, after riots burned the center of his capital, to hold water for the great palace above. It is called the Basilica Cistern because a basilica once stood over it. The water is still here. So are the columns, and almost none of them were made for this room.
Basilica Cistern, Medusa column bases, Sultanahmet, Istanbul
03FREE PREVIEW5 min
Istanbul — The Chora, the Painted Vault They Hid and Found and Hid Again
Out near the old land walls, away from the great monuments, there is a small church called the Chora. From the street it is almost nothing. Inside it holds the densest surviving picture program in the entire Byzantine world. Every vault and lunette is worked in mosaic and fresco, the life of the Virgin, the life of Christ, gold ground and deep blue, made around the years 1315 to 1321. A scholar and statesman named Theodore Metochites paid for it, and he had himself painted above the door, kneeling, holding a model of this very church up to Christ. He wanted to be remembered as the man who gave it.
Chora (Kariye), parekklesion Anastasis fresco, Edirnekapı, Istanbul
Troy, the Mound That Holds Nine Cities
15 min audio
3 episodes
A low mound above the Dardanelles holds at least nine cities stacked across more than three thousand years, each built on the rubble of the last. In 1871 a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann drove a trench straight down through all of them, chasing Homer's Iliad as literal fact. He found gold, named it after King Priam, and smuggled it out of Ottoman territory. He had also dug more than a thousand years too deep.
01FREE PREVIEW5 min
Troy — Hisarlık, the Mound That Holds Nine Cities
Stand on the mound at Hisarlık in the early morning, when the wind off the Dardanelles is still cold and the Aegean light is flat. Below you the strait glitters, the same water a thousand ships were said to cross. In front of you is a gash in the earth forty feet deep, cut by a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann in 1871. He was not looking for a city. He was looking for a poem.
Troy / Hisarlık, Çanakkale Province
02FREE PREVIEW5 min
Troy — The Sloping Walls, the City They Said Was Too Small
Walk to the eastern edge of the citadel and put your hand flat on the wall. This is not Schliemann's rubble. These are the great ramparts of the layer called Troy Six, cut around the thirteenth century BCE from fine limestone blocks, laid in courses that lean inward as they rise. Every few meters the wall steps back a finger's width, a vertical offset that runs its whole length. This is the most carefully built city in the whole mound. If any Troy looked like the city of a king, it is this one.
Troy VI citadel wall and south gate, Hisarlık
03FREE PREVIEW5 min
Troy — The Crowded House, Which Layer Was Homer's
Step just inside the wall, to the north of the great gate, and look at the ground where the small rooms are marked out. This is a different Troy from the one with the proud sloping walls. The fine city, Troy Six, came down around 1300 BCE, and the cracks in the masonry suggest the earth itself shook it apart rather than any army. What the survivors built next is the layer that should make you uneasy.
Troy VIIa houses, inside the citadel wall, Hisarlık
FAQ
Turkey audio tour questions
Is there a free Hidden Layers Turkey tour?+
Yes. You can hear a free web sample before you go, and if you are standing in Turkey, the first 2 stops are free in the app before the subscription wall.
Does the Turkey audio tour work offline?+
Yes. Download it before you go and it plays with no signal, no roaming charges, and no network connection required for playback.
Is it self-guided?+
Yes. You walk at your own pace and the tour gives you optional directions between stops only when you want them.
What does the Turkey tour cover?+
It covers Cappadocia, derinkuyu Underground City, Çatalhöyük, the Town With No Streets, Ephesus, the City That Worshipped a Goddess, Istanbul, Faith Painted Over, Troy, the Mound That Holds Nine Cities, Cappadocia, Catalhoyuk, Ephesus, Istanbul, and Troy.
How long is the Turkey audio tour?+
21 chapters, about 1h 38m total. You can do them in any order.
How is this different from other audio tour apps?+
We keep history honest. Instead of blending myth and fact, we separate what is documented, what is legend, and what nobody actually knows.