Real life dwarven stronghold: Derinkuyu

[Raven]

So, I recently was driving through the Appalachian mountains with my wife and looked up at a mountainside and said, "This mountain would be way cooler if there was a colony of dwarves living in it."
"How do you know there isn't?" she replied.

The idea of a colony of dwarves living underground is familiar to most who enjoy the fantasy genre. But what if an underground city-stronghold existed in the real world?

Well, it did. . . And kind of does.

Derinkuyu, an underground city, is in Turkey. The refuge, not currently populated, is well over 1,000 years old and "is large enough to have sheltered as many as 20,000 people together with their livestock and food stores."

This is not the only underground city in the area, and in fact another underground city can be reached from Derinkuyu by a five mile tunnel.

Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_underground_city