tunnels

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I have never been to Kapadocia, the ancestral village of my parents deep in Asia Minor. For my father it was the lost fatherland ( patris, hence patriotic) for us children a matter of mythical tales.

Kapadocia is famous for its underground villages www.jehpin.com/travel/tur...adocia.php .
On a rocky plateau, it had two reasons for going underground, cold, and invasions. There were Arab invasions from the 7th to 8th century ad, these were frontier villages.

In my father's village, a normal over the ground village, each house had a double basement, the second one used for preserving produce, and an exit to a tunnel. All these tunnels were going to the basement of a church, and from there a tunnel went up higher in the mountains, ending in a fortified village. When danger of invaders was announced with the ringing of the bells, the villagers would follow the tunnels to safety. My father became a refugee in 1922, with an exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece, what would now be called "ethnic cleansing". He was 11 when he left. The tunnels were in disuse, but he had followed them up to the church, where the main tunnel had collapsed by that time.

In retirement, my father bought a plot of land on the side of a hill in a small peninsula of the Corinth gulf, and started building and terraforming ; and digging tunnels, ostensibly to make wine caves, but I think it was the genes expressing themselves.

Once, joking, I asked him why did he not drill all the way through the hill, about 200 meters, to get to the other side on the Corinth gulf.
He mulled over the idea for a while, then said: "and where would I put all that dirt"?