Dungeon City Cafe

Swan dive belly flop.

Simpsons-themed Halloween house decorations.

Sometimes you just need to stick your paw in your mouth.

Fussy raven strips the leaves off a strawberry before accepting it.

Playing with a raven in the snow.

Sometimes a monkey just needs a hug.

This 800 year old linden tree is a real chonky chungus.

A sad photo won the 2026 Wildlife Photograph of the Year. It shows a grieving mother elephant carrying her dead calf with her trunk.

The red and white giant flying squirrel. He's a big boy as far as gliding animals go. Here's a picture of one of these chonky boys in flight.

FAQ: Do owls sneeze?

Owls being cute weirdos.

Sea otter plays basketball with a pumpkin.

Old but great: service dog likes the slide.

Apparently that's real:

More than 85m beneath the famous fairy chimneys of Cappadocia lies a massive subterranean city that was in near-constant use for thousands of years.

Violent gusts whipped loose soil into the air as I hiked through Cappadocia's Love Valley. Pink- and yellow-hued hillsides coloured the rolling landscape scarred with deep red canyons, and chimneystack rock formations loomed in the distance. It was arid, hot, windy and devastatingly beautiful. Millennia ago, this volatile, volcanic environment naturally sculpted the spires surrounding me into their conical, mushroom-capped shapes, which now draw millions of visitors to hike or hot-air balloon in the central Turkish region.

But beneath Cappadocia's crumbling surface, a marvel of equally gargantuan proportions lay hidden away for centuries; a subterranean city that could conceal the whereabouts of up to 20,000 inhabitants for months at a time.

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth's surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece. Not only do its cave-like rooms stretch on for hundreds of miles, but it's thought the more than 200 small, separate underground cities that have also been discovered in the region may be connected to these tunnels, creating a massive subterranean network.

According to my guide, Suleman, Derinkuyu was only "rediscovered" in 1963 by an anonymous local who kept losing his chickens. While he was renovating his home, the poultry would disappear into a small crevasse created during the remodel, never to be seen again. Upon closer investigation and some digging, the Turk unearthed a dark passageway. It was the first of more than 600 entrances found within private homes leading to the subterrestrial city of Derinkuyu.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:10 PM

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