Caves may have first been built in the soft volcanic rock by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people, in the 8th–7th centuries BC, according to the Turkish Department of Culture.

[5] The city was greatly expanded and deepened in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) era, when it was used for protection from Muslim Arab raids during the four centuries of Arab–Byzantine wars (780–1180).

[9][10] After the region fell to the Seljuk Turks of Persia, the cities were used as refuges (Greek: καταφύγια, romanized: kataphúgia) from the Turkish Muslim rulers, and as late as the 20th century the inhabitants, now called Rûm ('Eastern Romans') by their Ottoman Turkish rulers, were still using the underground cities to escape periodic waves of Ottoman persecution.

[11] Richard MacGillivray Dawkins, a Cambridge linguist who conducted research on the Cappodocian Greeks in the area from 1909–1911, recorded that in 1909, when the news came of the recent massacres at Adana, a great part of the population at Axo took refuge in these underground chambers, and for some nights did not venture to sleep above ground.

[12]When the Christian (Rûm) inhabitants of the region were expelled in 1923 in the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the tunnels were abandoned.

The third floor contains the most important areas of the underground compound: storage places, wine or oil presses, and kitchens.

The high number of storage rooms and areas for earthenware jars on the fourth floor indicates some economic stability.