Imagine a rolling landscape of towering, pristine castles almost as far as your eyes can see. It sounds breathtaking — and it is — just probably not in the way you’d think. These Disney-esque villas are in a Turkish housing development called Burj al Babas, and it’s completely abandoned.
Tag: turkey
Turkey coup postmortem
impressive analysis. if we’re lucky, historians of the future will have a much much higher quality view of what actually happened.
A group of plotters of the failed Turkish coup attempt used a WhatsApp group to communicate with each other. Bellingcat has transcribed, translated, and analysed the conversation, thereby cross-referencing the messages with photos, videos, and news reports of the evening, night, and morning of July 15-16.
Istanbul history
When the excavation reached what had been the bottom of the sea, the archeologists announced that they could finally cede part of the site to the engineers, after one last survey of the seabed—just a formality, really, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from 8 ka BP. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before 3.3 ka BP. The excavators, attempting to avoid traces of Istanbul’s human history, had ended up finding an extra 5000 years of it.
Largest cave city
just in time for my trip to cappadocia in 1 week…
A 5 ka underground city thought to be the largest in the world has been discovered in central Turkey. The subterranean settlement was discovered in the Nevşehir province of Turkey’s Central Anatolia region, in the historical area of Cappadocia.
Turkey impressions
this is amazing, and strengthening my resolve to return to turkey, the cradle of western civilization.
5 ka game tokens
The find confirms that board games likely originated and spread from the Fertile Crescent regions and Egypt more than 5 ka ago (Senet from predynastic Egypt is considered the world’s oldest game board). The tokens were accompanied by badly preserved wooden pieces or sticks. Sağlamtimur hopes they’ll provide some hints on the rules and logic behind the game.
Erdogan messes with Putin
stopping and searching incoming aircraft for military materiel basically amounts to mounting a blockade, and that blockades are considered open acts of war, how subtle could Turkey possibly be trying to be?
Byzantium
Istanbul as it never was: If all the palaces had been properly maintained instead of the sorry village the turks conquered in 1453.
French illustrator Antoine Helbert is a great fan of the architecture of Byzantium and has created more than 24 intricate drawings of buildings and monuments in the capitol city of Constantinople spanning a period of almost 1000 years from the 4th century to the 13th century.
Soganli
off the beaten path cave dwellings
Istanbul
an ode
Beloved for its complex, layered past, Istanbul, where East meets West, may also offer a vision of what’s to come. I don’t think I’d ever stepped inside a cinema restroom to see little video screens along the wall projecting fashion runway footage until I went to Istanbul a few months ago. But then—my life is so sheltered!—I’d never seen mini-screens lining an elevator on the way to the movies, either. The hit song from Slumdog Millionaire, “Jai Ho,” was pulsing through every floor of City’s Mall in Istanbul’s Nisantasi district when I visited, and the restrooms next to the cinema lobby were marked by life-size cutouts of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
Gregor J. Rothfuss 