Clearpost.online It's your post, so post it!

Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica Cherner. Originally “planned as a luxurious, stately urban development offering the look of royal living for anyone willing to shell out anywhere from $370,000 to $500,000 for their own little palace,” it now stands as an unfinished ghost town. And though the project only broke ground a decade ago, it’s already settled into a veritably eerie — and highly photographable — state of decay.

This, of course, more than suits the sensibilities of an adventure-oriented YouTube channel like Fearless & Far. Its exploration of Burj Al Babas — one of several such videos currently available — offers on-the-ground views of what we can only call the town’s ruins. “This fantasy paradise land didn’t sell,” says its host. “Some blame the Turkish real estate crisis; some blame the kitschiness of it all. It’s all so strange. It’s all so fake.”

Indeed, write McLaughlin and Cherner, “as building the town got underway, locals became enraged with both the aesthetic of the homes and the business practices of the developers,” who subsequently declared bankruptcy, leaving the development in limbo.

Those who know their Middle Eastern languages will recognize the very name Burj Al Babas as a “nonsensical mashup of Arabic and Turkish,” as Ruth Michaelson and Beril Eski put it in an in-depth Guardian piece last month. Though located in Turkey, with an intent to take advantage of local hot springs, it was financed with money from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Since its construction “abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has beco*e a bizarre white elephant,” causing scandal, lawsuits, an attempted suicide, “and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.” Anyone who’s seen Burj Al Babas up-close will have their doubts about its prospects for co*pletion — but if they’ve got a YouTube channel of their own, they’ll hardly want demolition to start before they can pay it a visit themselves.

Related content:

A Visit to Tianducheng, China’s Eerily Empty $1 Billion Copy of Paris

Discover the Ghost Towns of Japan – Where Scarecrows Replace People, and a Man Lives in an Abandoned Elementary School Gym

Exploring the Greatest of Italy’s 6,000 Ghost Towns: Take a Tour of Craco, Italy

Discover the Disappearing Turkish Language That is Whistled, Not Spoken

A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires co*e Together

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.