Some poor schlub went to clean out his basement and found a city … :eek:
Not quite a first world problem, but now one wonders if he can keep the city and have lots of space, or if he loses the basement [and house] to the government as a permanent archeological site.
I think there’s an SCP Foundation entry that starts like this; only the city turns out to be inhabited.
The first thing I thought of was King Charles escaping from Zembla.
If the government does take it over (even because he probably wrecked his foundation), it was nice of them to let him do all the hard labor, and pay for it.
If this happened in the US, I’d assume they’d take the house away from him at the first sign of it being an archeological site. You have to wonder how much stuff Joe Homeowner ruined just hacking away at the earth with a shovel and pick axe from the local hardware store.
I vaguely recall a house like this in Jerusalem. Same deal. Homeowners start digging in the basement and found ancient ruins. It’s been featured in several documentaries. I can’t recall the name of the homeowners.
Google was nice to me tonight. Here’s the house. They spent over ten years excavating under it.
https://www.collarcitybrownstone.com/2013/09/3000-years-old-find-home-old-city-jerusalem-wow.html
Some of the houses in Chicago have basements with entrances to an underground tunnel system. Al Copone and his buddies used the tunnel system to move booze around the city. The old entrances to the tunnels were bricked up but a determined homeowner could open it back up.
There was nothing in Al Capone’s vault, but it wasn’t Geraldo’s fault.
Its actually very common
This guy got permission to spend of the order of $120,000 to make it a tourist attraction, he seems to have rights to it.
Perhaps he can’t claim ownership to the space outside his land boundaries but since he controls access and he controls most of it, he has rights of some sort.
There’s such construction/mining under homes in Paris, Instanbul, Athens, there’s a documentary series dedicated to the topic of mysterious or fantastic underground constructions.
There’s a house near here which has an entry to a 100 metre long tunnel… which goes under other homes, under a road, and park land, and out to a cliff face. Originally for WW II Military use.
By tiny people who declare war on the surface?
Don’t delve too deep. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world