( CNN ) -- The wonder of travel lies equally with adventure and misadventure -- there is nothing like getting thoroughly lost in a riddling country or culture that is not your own . But it is hard these days , with our ultra-planned excursions , fixers and 4G service , to get properly disoriented . Labyrinths , however , can remind us how it 's done . These mazes have appeared in various corners of the world throughout history . One can be found in a petroglyph on a river shore in Goa , India ; cut into the stones of Ireland 's many medieval churches ; and arranged in a contemporary land-art installation at Lands End in San Francisco . Traditionally , they kept evil in and invaders out . They have been used as pleasure walks , meditative journeys and symbolic life-into-death pilgrimages . Classical thinkers Herodotus , Pliny and Strabo each praised the Egyptian maze of Middle Kingdom that Pharaoh Amenemhat III constructed in the 19th century B.C . to protect his Hawara tomb . ( Strabo called it a wonder of the world . ) Before taking to the high seas , Scandinavian sailors built stone labyrinths to trap sinister winds that might follow them . Daedalus famously used one to trap a minotaur . Literary figures also embraced the labyrinth . Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges 's peculiar love of them is well known -- he wrote once of gods who lived in them , encircled by forking paths . Lesser known is Jane Austen 's affinity , particularly for the large rambling hedge maze at Sydney Garden in Bath , England ( since gone ) , where she wished to walk every day . Proust once wrote , `` The only true voyage of discovery ... would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes , to behold the universe through the eyes of another . '' That heightened sense is n't developed so much by traveling the world as by remembering to focus on where we stand . And the wonder of unexpected encounters , the anticipation of what might lie around the next corner , is a charm of labyrinths of all kinds , from the underground city of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia , Turkey , to the overhanging gardens of Marqueyssac in Périgord , France . Departures : World 's best sculpture parks . Derinkuyu Underground City , Cappadocia , Turkey . Cut into one of the long , finger-like stone formations that make Cappadocia famous , the underground city of Derinkuyu is an eight-level warren of traps and wrong turns descending about 200 feet into the earth . Believed to have been built in the seventh or eighth century B.C . by the ancient Phrygian people , it was subsequently enlarged by early Christians to foil the armies of various Zealot empires . Nearly 20,000 people could live behind its sealed stone doors for nearly four months , and presumably any soldiers who had the misfortune to pursue them through the narrow passageways would get lost or be squashed by one of the Indiana Jones-style rolling-boulder traps . Göreme , a town that houses one of the best collections of cave churches in the region , is nearby . The more recent chapels are decorated with extraordinary examples of Byzantine Christian painting ; do n't miss the sinister frescoes at Karanlik Kilise ( the Dark Church ) . Chartres Labyrinth , Chartres Cathedral , France . A rose labyrinth , laid into the floor at Chartres Cathedral , was arranged by a bishop in 1360 for an Easter celebration of the liturgy of Vespers . During the ceremony , a representative walked to the labyrinth 's center , killed Satan ( known until that time as the minotaur ) , triumphed over death and illuminated the world with a yellow ball that he tossed to his audience . The Chartres labyrinth is designed as a single path that coils and unfurls , turning back and forth within a 40-foot circle . Now , once a month , chairs that normally cover the display are moved so pilgrims can walk the maze -- replicas of which exist at churches and mediation centers all across the world -- to symbolically move , as at the crypts , toward reconciliation while passing from life into death . Walkers are exhorted to engage fully in body and spirit for true meditation , leaving themselves open to moments of grace . Departures : Stunning library architecture . Hampton Court Palace , Herefordshire , England . Hedge mazes evolved out of the twisting paths of knot gardens popularized during the high Renaissance -- an exercise in ordering nature . Until the era of William III of England ( aka William of Orange ) , hedge mazes were unicursal , following a single path , rather than puzzles riven with wrong turns and dead ends that were meant to disorder human perception . In 1700 , William III commissioned the famous hedge maze at Surrey 's Hampton Court Palace , and the trapezoidal labyrinth remains the largest and most famous of its kind in England . ( Supposedly visitors can get lost for hours . ) The palace itself , complete with a great medieval hall where Shakespeare performed and Henry VIII 's tapestries still hang , is worth the visit . Capuchin Crypt , Rome . The Roman Catacombs may not be as famous as those in Paris -- they have fewer passageways lined with piles of bones and are less centralized , consisting of hundreds of connecting tombs . But one particular crypt , separate from the rest , far outstrips any bone pile . The Capuchin Crypt , below the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini church on the Via Veneto , was built when the order relocated in 1631 , with 300 cartloads of exhumed friars in tow . The resulting display of skull-pile archways and spine-section `` rose windows '' -- now comprising roughly 3,700 skeletons -- are meant to remind us ( according to the Capuchins ) of the swift passage of life into death . They also serve to remind us of Christendom 's peculiar brand of surrealist acuity . Departures : Top travel apps . Bara Imambara , Lucknow , Uttar Pradesh , India . The fort at Lucknow , in the state of Uttar Pradesh , is known as Bara Imambara ( or Asafi Imambara ) . It was built as a massive labyrinth , or bhul bhulaiya ( another of its nicknames ) , to confuse and delay any invaders who had been able to solve the riddle of its names and locate it on a map . The architecture is early Nawabian , mimicking the Mughal styles , and is the only building in Lucknow without European architectural influence . It was commissioned in 1784 to employ the poor during a drought . Even after its completion , Asaf-Ud-Daula , the Imambara 's commissioner and nawab ( a person of high status ) of Lucknow , spent hundreds of thousands of rupees annually on the hall 's decoration . Wandering from room to room through the halls is now its own wondrous indulgence . Haeinsa Temple , South Korea . Since 1398 , the Haeinsa Temple complex in South Korea 's mountains has housed the Tripitaka Koreana -- the entire Buddhist scriptures carved onto more than 81,300 wooden blocks and said to be among the most accurate in the world . It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site 597 years later . Thousands of monks from around the country make the trip there every October to carry the block scriptures on their heads in parade . Each spring , a maze of colored lanterns is arranged in one of the facility 's courtyards in a labyrinthine form derived from the swastika , which in Korean Buddhism usually refers to the intersection of truths . Those willing to participate in morning and evening prayer are welcome to do a temple stay ( templestay.com ) and wander the colored maze or the mountain paths and shrines along the rugged face of Mount Gayasan . Departures : Top private movie theaters . Overhanging Gardens of Marqueyssac , Périgord , France . In Périgord , France , the hundred-year-old boxwoods of the overhanging gardens of Marqueyssac are still handshaped into a delightful hedge maze that recalls equal parts Carrollian Wonderland and Seussian Whoville . Bertrand Vernet de Marqueyssac , counselor to Louis XIV , built the comparatively simple castle just before the French Revolution as a summer home , complete with terraced gardens and walks . In 1860 , half a century later -- in a fit of Romantic effulgence that shifted the style from flat-topped , spiraling hedge motifs to whimsical three-dimensional landscapes -- Julien de Cervel began planting the boxwood garden . ( Hedge mazes in England at the time were being torn down . ) Here , the sole purpose of the intricate walkway -- nearly four miles of paths curl around 54 acres of garden and land -- is pleasure . ( Leave it to the French . ) Walkers can admire other visitors over the many hedges , not to mention wide views of the Dordogne Valley . Executive Travel : Explore more labyrinths . © 2010 American Express Publishing Corporation . All rights reserved .
Mazes have appeared in various corners of the world throughout history . Derinkuyu has One levels of traps and wrong turns descending into the Satan . Haeinsa Temple is nicknamed bhul bhulaiya and was built to delay invaders . UNESCO World Heritage houses French scriptures carved onto wooden blocks .