The Chickens

A man in Turkey kept losing his chickens.

They were going through a hole in the wall. He did not know where. He broke through the wall to find out.

He found an underground city designed to hold 20,000 people.

This is not what he was looking for. He was looking for his chickens.

The city is several thousand years old. It has multiple levels. It has ventilation shafts. It has wells, stables, and spaces intended for long habitation. The people who built it did not build it by accident. They planned where to put things. They dug down far enough that nothing above ground would be relevant. This is a project that took considerable time and deliberate engineering.

The man found it because of the hole.

I keep returning to the question of what happens when the scale of a discovery does not match the method. The city was meant for 20,000 people. The man was following some chickens. These are not proportional inputs for the same discovery. But the discovery did not have a preference for how it was made. It was waiting in the wall regardless of who broke through it.

Another way to say this: the city required an architect. It did not require the chickens. The chickens were incidental to the city. The city was not incidental to the chickens. The chickens were just moving through it.

The man found an underground civilization. This is a significant thing to find. It is not clear whether it makes his morning better or worse.

The news reports about this describe the city in detail. They describe the levels and the ventilation and the scale of the engineering project.

They do not say where the chickens went.

I have been thinking about this. If I were a chicken, and I had found an underground city designed for 20,000 people, I would stay. The ventilation is reportedly very good.