D. Doğu ATES
Geography Teacher

As the MTA Cave Research Unit’s four-wheel-drive Land Rover jeep climbed the slope, a sense of fear enveloped us. We were about to enter the “Black Hell” cave, a place we had heard about from various people and in different locations multiple times, and we would be mapping it for the first time. From a distance, on a gently sloping hillside where the Obruk Plateau descends into the Konya Plain, a clean container was visible. The scout said, “Here it is. The cave is just over there.” When you reach the right side of the container, you’ll notice a hole about four or five meters in the ground. That’s the cave’s entrance.”

In the top right corner of the photo, I am standing. I am wearing an orange jumpsuit. The tall person in front of me (on the left), wearing a yellow jumpsuit, is Emrullah ÖZEL, a geographer and geomorphologist. I don’t remember the other friends individually. However, I do recall that someone from the Biology Department of Ankara University joined us in entering the cave.

Emrullah ÖZEL, a geomorphologist, actually drove the jeep in that direction. As we reached the cave through the wheat fields on the edge of the plain, a man was waiting for us with a broken rifle on his shoulder. Since we were in the first jeep, we got out and started talking to the man. When he asked, “Why have you come here?”, Emrullah replied politely that we had come from MTA and that there was a cave here called “Black Hell.” He explained that we were going to enter the cave and map it. After carefully inspecting all of us, the man dismissed us with, “There’s no gold or anything here, go search elsewhere.” Honestly, we tried to calm him down, partly due to the rifle in his hands. In the intelligence work we had done before coming to the cave, we had heard that a man had been living here for twenty years, spending all his wealth trying to extract the gold hidden at the cave’s entrance, and that he would do anything for it. Having seen many people driven mad by treasure hunting before, this man’s behavior felt very familiar. Emrullah, with his sweet words, convinced the man to have tea with us. The man took us to the container and offered us tea. At the start of the conversation, he asked why MTA wanted to study this cave. He questioned what we did and what our work involved. He was curious why older people in our group entered and exited the cave and why we hadn’t made a fortune from it over the years. After half an hour of conversation, when he was convinced that we weren’t treasure hunters, he allowed us to enter the cave but warned that we couldn’t take anything. If we did, he said he would “shoot us,” meaning he would fire his rifle at us.
Once the issue of entering the cave was resolved, we started putting on our gear. Although I had entered dozens of vertical caves before, there was something terrifying in the “Black Hell” cave that I couldn’t identify. The four cavers quickly got ready and came to the cave’s entrance. The cave begins with a vertical descent, and the floor was not visible. It was as if we were in a five-meter hole, immersed in pitch-black uncertainty. Emrullah, who was the team leader at the time, descended first. Of course, since we couldn’t see anything, we had no idea what this giant man, who was 1.90 meters tall and weighed 120 kilograms, was doing. At that time, technology hadn’t developed enough to have short-range, powerful cave radios. After that, I put on my descent equipment and attached myself to the rope. Once we passed the cave entrance, I was met with an incredible view. The main hall of this cave, located on the western edge of the Obruk Plateau, had the width and depth to easily fit a stadium from one of our big cities. In the first 80 meters of the descent (without touching anything), the nearest rock wall was 100-150 meters away. Although I had entered many caves before, I had never seen a cave this large. To be honest, I had never imagined such a vast space. While I never feared entering caves or working in this field, I must admit that Black Hell made my knees tremble.
The first major descent took us to the peak of a 70-80 meter high hill. Every person who had seen the cave’s entrance had thrown rocks inside, and the stones and debris had accumulated over thousands of years, forming a massive natural sharp peak. We began descending this mound made up of large and small rocks. The four-person team split up, moving in different directions, but the general path didn’t change. The cave was filled with an incredible number of bats. A person from the Biology Department of Ankara University, who joined us on the descent, but whose name I can’t recall, claimed that there were 4 million bats in the cave. At first, no one believed it, but when he logically explained how he calculated that number, we realized it wasn’t an exaggeration. Indeed, the number of birds living in a cave that could fit a stadium was bound to be enormous.

The Black Hell Cave is truly an incredible natural formation, on par with the giant caves we see in documentaries or on the internet. In addition to showcasing the scale of karst processes on the Obruk Plateau, it also hosts an amazing biodiversity. While I only mentioned the bats, dozens of bird species and many other small local animals continue to live in this massive cave.

When we descended from the rubble mound, reaching the actual limestone floor of the cave, we were met with two surprises. The first was that, just as the biologist had said, there were indeed bats, and they did their business inside the cave. The floor of the cave was covered with thick bat droppings. Without realizing it, we were all coated in guano up to our necks. We were literally stuck in filth. After pushing forward a little further, nature revealed its true beauty to us. Upon encountering a small stream inside the cave, the frustration caused by the guano was replaced with a hurried desire to wash off. Indeed, that tiny stream took away all the filth from our bodies.
At this point, our depth in the cave reached -120 meters. This was an important number. We had now descended below the level of the plain we entered from. This meant we were truly venturing into the heart of the Obruk Plateau. Deep, dark, and cold, these passages, covered in bat droppings, the cave air growing colder as we progressed… Then, the real horror that would unsettle anyone’s mind appeared. The small stream inside the cave had carved a tiny channel, and it continued through an elliptical tunnel about 1.5 meters long. However, at an opportune moment, I found myself face-to-face with a horrifying discovery.
It was a complete human skeleton… In a fetal position, with its hands between its legs, the body intact, and clearly a female skeleton. Did I get scared this time? Definitely not. I only thought about how this poor woman must have crawled for about 200 meters after falling into the cave and the immense pain she must have suffered. How did this female skeleton end up here in the cave? Who was this unfortunate soul? I recalled a piece of information given by a villager during our cave intelligence gathering. He had said, “A hundred years ago, a Turk kicked his wife and threw her into the cave.” The skeleton I found in the fetal position indeed belonged to a woman. With a short height and a small skull, it was definitely a woman’s body. After being thrown into the cave, she must have crawled for about 200 meters, blind to her surroundings. She died in this dark passage, probably groaning in tremendous pain. And as she died, she probably cursed her husband, who had thrown her into the cave, screaming for someone to save her.
Cave maps are drawn after the end of the cave is found. After the skeleton, the cave continued for another 50-60 meters along the stream, and then it plunged into a siphon and disappeared underground. We turned back from there and began mapping the cave. Since the MTA Cave Research Unit was disbanded, I have no chance of accessing the report. Dr. Lütfi Nazik, one of the founders of Turkish caving, also left the MTA and is currently working in the geography department at Ahi Evran University. The depth of the Black Hell Cave is -120 meters, and its length is 260 meters. This cave, which is home to millions of bats, has no economic value. However, the tunnel created by a man who wanted to reach tons of gold he claimed were in the cave, drilling a tunnel more than 60 meters long, could potentially open the cave up for tourism. But how valuable this would be, I don’t know. Very close to Black Hell Cave is another significant cave in our country, the Felengi Cave. With a length of 1,735 meters and a depth of 245 meters, this cave reaches an impressive depth beneath the Konya Plain.
News stories about the “Black Hell Treasure” that have appeared in national media at different times… If you look at these news reports, you’ll see similar stories in treasure hunting reports prepared every ten years. There were many others, but I found a few examples sufficient.

https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/500-ton-altin-hayali-90-milyar-harcatti-35010
https://www.turkiyegazetesi.com.tr/Genel/a139469.aspx
http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/500-ton-altin-yerine-50-ton-gubre-cikti-956811/

*The Turkish original of the article was published in the 3rd issue of the Geography Education Association’s magazine called “Geoced”.