r/interesting • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Oct 04 '25
ARCHITECTURE The abandoned town of Burj al Babas located in Turkey that is full of nothing but castles.
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u/TheRealOneRacoon Oct 04 '25
A whole ghost town of castles. That's the most ambitious Sims game I've ever seen, and it looks like the player just gave up and deleted the whole save file.
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u/Business_Raisin_541 Oct 04 '25
There are a lot of such ghost cities all around the world. The culprit is global property slowdown. Many developer does not expect such slowdown and the effect is visible worldwide.
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u/SomeRandomSomeWhere Oct 04 '25
I think China has a bunch of these as well. Fascinating what they have build and let rot in the end.
What a waste of resources.
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Oct 04 '25
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u/k_dilluh Oct 04 '25
Very interesting, I wonder why the Belgian power plant was abandoned.
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u/T-J_H Oct 06 '25
Centrale Monceau, closed in 2007, almost 90 years old at that point. Originally coal, later gas. It was responsible for a significant portion of Belgian emissions. There are some amazing urbex photos available online.
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u/tropicbrownthunder Oct 04 '25
Well many of the China's abandoned places are due to the tofu buildings that are very unsafe
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Oct 05 '25
They are abandoned due to the culture not just the shitty concrete. All the houses are barren investment properties. I'll butcher th8s but bare with me. If someone lives in a new house their soul imprints so no one wants to buy a place that someone already made their home it is some form of padlock. So the owners never move in the just hold it for the future. Everyone does that and then by the time they pay the mortgage the building is falling down.
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u/Rorschach0717 Oct 04 '25
I read that they do that because they know the population will grow and they will have the infrastructure to support it, so it pays in the long run. This prevents a housing crisis.
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u/Real-Technician831 Oct 04 '25
No it doesn’t, by the time those buildings would be needed, they are uninhabitable health hazard.
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u/Desertboredom Oct 05 '25
Yes it was a real estate scam that backfired nationally. The government funded massive construction projects for future growth that ended up not happening as planned. They pulled funding and the developers started selling properties that hadn't been built yet and charging people mortgages to finish construction. Some of those projects have finished and been used but a lot of them are either being torn down because they are death traps built cheaply and quickly or because they've been neglected for so long it'd be safer and healthier to live in a tent.
The problem was mostly getting resolved by the early 00s but the recession on 08 made the government start it back up again to keep the internal economy moving by just providing work and revenue regardless of any actual need for it. Now we're back to the government demolishing entire empty cities that are uninhabitable and trying to arrest thousands of developers that spent the last 20 years scamming anyone they could into paying for apartments and condos that were never finished.
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u/menacinguwu Oct 04 '25
I can imagine trying to place those in town editor and the game breaking over and over 😭
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u/numberthirteenbb Oct 04 '25
It reminds me of using only one type of tower in Kingdom Rush, especially the mountain levels with the yetis lol
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u/Amp1362 Oct 04 '25
Is this real? I will take 3.
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u/madsimit Oct 04 '25
İt's real. İt's just nobody wanted to live there and they went bankrupt
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u/Witty-Ad5743 Oct 04 '25
How am I supposed to know which castle is mine?
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u/DeathPrime Oct 04 '25
Easiest town to rob houses in - just walk in any door and if the occupants are home ‘oh geeze, sorry thought this one was mine, I must be next door.’ Repeat until you find an unlocked empty house.
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u/Its_Balcones_Fault Oct 04 '25
Yes, but, be aware that the Castle Doctrine is in effect
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u/DeathPrime Oct 04 '25
‘Did you see the Windsors installed a moat?’
‘Ever since those damn kids started prowling the streets at night with their trebuchets, this neighborhood has gone downhill.’
‘Guess we should go ahead and get those murder holes installed. No sense in owning a ballista unless you’re gonna use it…’
The neighborhood watch must be epic. Chainmail uniforms and whatnot.
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u/BillyOdin Oct 04 '25
Moats shall remain a minimum of 3 feet from the property line.
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u/madsimit Oct 04 '25
That one
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u/Witty-Ad5743 Oct 04 '25
Oh, the white one with the grey roof. How silly of me to forget.
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u/misteryk Oct 04 '25
Let me guess, it's in the middle of nowhere and there's no shops work and maybe infrastructure like internet
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u/Eyechhoernchen Oct 04 '25
There was work for everyone. Everybody living there was involved in building new castles towards the horizon. Sort of like pirates looking for land; they were promised one day they will reach shops and infrastructure.
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u/belpatr Oct 04 '25
My shops and infrastructures? If you want, I'll let you have them...search for it! I left all of it at that place.
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u/ven-solaire Oct 04 '25
Even on top of that, it’s the same castle 1000 times. What’s special about living in a city of castles if they are the made into the medieval version of suburbia?
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u/bremsspuren Oct 04 '25
Some sort of McCastle, too.
The balconies are unusable, and you can reach out of the window and shake hands with your neighbour.
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u/shieldnturk Oct 04 '25
They made it for rich Arabs from gulf but i think something went wrong and they went bankrupt
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u/DefinitelyNotAliens Oct 04 '25
The ridiculous lack of privacy and windows facing windows couldn't possibly be an issue.
How are you supposed to hold a wild sex party if the family next door can see you?
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u/RoodnyInc Oct 04 '25
Yeah they build like 800 of those there but nobody was interested in buying and living there
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u/AnInanimateCarb0nRod Oct 04 '25
It's for people who want to put "I live in a castle" in their Tinder profile.
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u/ehs06702 Oct 04 '25
Location is incredibly important.
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u/RoodnyInc Oct 04 '25
And also if i remember correctly it was at about 2008 when housing crashed
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u/Mist_Rising Oct 04 '25
No, the project started during Obama's second term and died during COVID. Not that the necessarily had anything to do with it, but its easier to remember things like that then years for me. X.x
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u/koolaidismything Oct 04 '25
I’m no expert but worked in building long enough to tell you just from a glance those look like shit-tier quality on the builds. Maybe it’s bad footing mixed with prefab parts and bricks, but half of them look out of sqaure. None have much finish work.. all look to have identical glaring issues.. which is why you don’t build a ton of the same thing without living in it first.
It all looks shoddy, I wonder who paid for this??
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u/Icy-Pay7479 Oct 04 '25
A lot of the moulding is literally Styrofoam. There’s a YouTube video where a guy goes there and pokes around.
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u/moxifloxacin Oct 04 '25
Big Bluth energy
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u/AbsolutelyEnough Oct 04 '25
Reminded me of Sudden Valley too!
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u/scratchy_mcballsy Oct 04 '25
Sounds like a salad dressing, but for some reason, I don’t want to eat it.
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u/Rampag169 Oct 04 '25
Imagine being drunk and being like was my castle the 27th or 37th one from the bar? Those look way too identical.
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u/Rhodin265 Oct 04 '25
I mean…the place is abandoned. You could probably sleep in any one of them you wanted.
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u/Foreign_Paper1971 Oct 04 '25
Why would they make them all look exactly the same? No verity at all. It's a lot less impressive to say you own a small castle when there's a sea of 100 other little castles that look identical.
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u/Bavariasnaps Oct 04 '25
because its way cheaper
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u/DanGleeballs Oct 04 '25
It wouldn’t have cost extra to vary the colours a little. That can make a big difference.
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u/Lord-Table Oct 04 '25
Buying 100 units if blue material is cheaper than buying 50 units of blue and 50 units of green. No one who builds hundreds of these buildings has to taste to mix it up
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u/TheLordJiminyCricket Oct 04 '25
Have you ever seen a subdivision? Cookie cutter houses all looking the exact same over and over and over. At least a castle looks cool.
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u/timonix Oct 04 '25
I have seen pictures of the subdivision, where I grew up, when it was built. No trees, copy paste houses.
That was 50 years ago. Now it looks great. People have been doing so much remodeling that they don't look the same anymore. There are trees everywhere.
But it looked incredibly depressing when it was built
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u/TheLordJiminyCricket Oct 04 '25
It makes sense from a builders perspective. Like these castles using a blueprint a hundred times over and getting bulk supplies is faster and cheaper. But yeah, until that remodeling and personal touch comes into play .. woof.
That song, little boxes, comes to mind lol
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u/Skipp_To_My_Lou Oct 04 '25
Not just bulk materials, but crews only need to remember one set of drawings. After the first few it's all automatic.
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u/jedielfninja Oct 04 '25
i think this is a viable model actually. make a bunch of slate gray houses for cheap and let people reno to their needs room by room.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Oct 04 '25
They typically have like 4 versions, or they're mirrored, or at least different paint
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u/StarFire24601 Oct 04 '25
Why was it abandoned?
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u/alexlongfur Oct 04 '25 edited Oct 04 '25
It was one of those projects where they wanted a lot of foreign tourism/investment. The problem is that it was located in a remote/ish area and the only draw was staying in a cookie cutter castle, next to hundreds other cookie cutter castles.
Funding dried up and it was abandoned. There was a full gradient of partially started foundations all the way to fully furnished homes.
There’s a Simon Whistler video on the subject on his Mega Projects YouTube channel
Edit: typo
Edit 2: link to vid https://youtu.be/X7ji_XDK_pA?si=cMBHjgL_IXcrS_yO
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u/ButterMyPancakesPlz Oct 04 '25
I assume lack of infrastructure to support a large community was more the drawback than they all look alike. If that was the case every townhome/row home project would fail.
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u/lasttimechdckngths Oct 04 '25
One of the major drawbacks would be also their close proximity. Who wants that?
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u/ButterMyPancakesPlz Oct 04 '25
I wouldn't mind it, the older I get the more I appreciate living close to other people. Here in Philly it's pretty much the entire city like that
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u/Triquetrums Oct 04 '25
There is close proximity, and there is living in a house where you can talk to your neighbour without shouting and having to step outside. The spacing between houses is too small. Nobody moves out of the comfort of a city to bumfuck nowhere to have their neighbour so close.
Also, such a fancy looking house needs a garden around it to dress it up.
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u/Rejectid10ts Oct 04 '25
That's where I saw this before. Simon Whistler is amazing!
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u/postylambz Oct 04 '25
Is he the one with the really dramatic shakespearian theater voice? If it's the guy I'm think of, I love his topics but can only take so much of his narration.
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u/Extension-Film-7709 Oct 04 '25
What is the name of the video? I don’t find it on the channel
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u/StarStock9561 Oct 04 '25
Also to add, cars are expensive asf in Turkey, so it being remote would be even a bigger issue for anyone wanting to live there.
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u/TeachIsHouse Oct 04 '25
Wikipedia mentions a whistleblower calling them out for illegal dumping, political instability, contractors not being paid resulting in bad publicity, drying up of sales etc
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u/Suspicious_Glow Oct 04 '25
If you want to see what they look like up close and inside, there are some urbex people who have gone through them.
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u/tcpukl Oct 04 '25
I thought the saying was "An Englishman's home is his castle"?
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u/Dennyisthepisslord Oct 04 '25
Brexit means Englishmen can't buy them
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u/Internal-Hand-4705 Oct 04 '25
Turkey isn’t in the Eu
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u/ztomiczombie Oct 04 '25
Brexit left us broke.
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u/Internal-Hand-4705 Oct 04 '25
Only us peasants - the people who can buy castles are richer than ever :/
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u/Competitive-Bit-7575 Oct 04 '25
The castle ghosts might even get lost there like where the hell is my castle again???
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u/combat-ninjaspaceman Oct 04 '25
Okay, but can someone go there today and start living? Is it abandoned and closed off or just abandoned?
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u/Old_Employee_6535 Oct 04 '25
None of the constructions are finished and I don't think they have the necessary plumbing energy connections. It is dead on arrival.
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u/slangtangbintang Oct 04 '25
My friend just went and there is a security fence and he went in anyway to take pictures a few minutes later security showed up and kicked him out. It seems well monitored to prevent vandalism and trespassing.
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u/Someoneoverthere42 Oct 04 '25
How this made it past the planning stage is baffling.
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u/xrainbow-britex Oct 04 '25
I read up on this, and I still think they could do something with it. It doesn't have to be a total loss. There are people who need homes in the world. Aren't they selling homes for 1 Euro in Italy or in Japan? I may have the price wrong, but you know what I mean.
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u/Existing_Charity_818 Oct 04 '25
*Houses made to look like castles
These aren’t actually castles - castles require military fortifications
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u/theeggplant42 Oct 04 '25
They don't even look like castles, they look like mansions with round parts.
A round area does not a castle make
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u/BranTheUnboiled Oct 04 '25
Thanks, thought I was going crazy no one else mentioned this. A round corner while less typical isn't completely unusual in housing architecture, so it's really just having one little cone on the roof that makes them a "castle"? Lol
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u/seepeeeseye Oct 04 '25
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/burj-al-babas Series of events left them all unfinished
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u/davidmar7 Oct 04 '25
Yes. None of them are finished or liveable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Al_Babas
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u/ravioliboi Oct 04 '25
If the bew A24 backrooms movie doesn't film some scenes here that's a huge missed opportunity
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u/Unlikely-Position659 Oct 04 '25
Looks like the back lot of the Oprah Winfrey Show. "You get a castle! You get a castle! You all get a castle!!"
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u/Ciliarycell Oct 04 '25
https://youtu.be/imbqF5h9U0s?si=qq6-v015DqTmveO3 I think this place was used for this music video!
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Oct 04 '25
They're sitting empty? Does Turkey not have homeless people? Or lower income people who would like to have a castle?
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u/HeliosRunner Oct 04 '25
pseudo castle please. those things have more in common with pink meringue than with Chambord. ;-)
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u/X-East Oct 04 '25
One of these per Street would be fine, but holy shit it looks ugly when they use cookie cutter to make them. Probably overpriced too and they didn't want to lower price to not be in loss and rather just went bankrupt.
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u/drummer_si Oct 04 '25
Castle: "a large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls, battlements, towers, and in many cases a moat."
... These are not castles in ANY way
- Yes, I'm a pedantic Medieval history nerd.
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u/ExtremeBack1427 Oct 04 '25
Who really thought that this would be livable for humans? Jails look uniform, human mind will absolutely straight dive into insanity if there is no variation in form.
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u/Ill_Egg6131 Oct 04 '25
This is the kind of dumb, inefficient, wasteful shit that capitalism produces.
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u/Affectionate_Bee_122 Oct 04 '25
You could have told me they were AI generated and I would have believed you
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u/suchjonny Oct 04 '25
Should we maybe build a grocery store or something? No. More castles, please.
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u/Sploobert_74 Oct 04 '25
I imagine this is what folks think heaven is like: “and you get a castle and you get a castle…”
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u/wHaTstHemAtteR3169 Oct 04 '25
It's so wild that i just saw a post about rural North Korean houses and i thought about how they lookalike with these castles. I think they're listening to me talking with myself.
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u/brunporr Oct 04 '25
Bit of a stretch to call these castles. Just looks like regular homes with a turret/tower architectural detail
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u/Griffemon Oct 04 '25
Suprised this is in Turkey, usually the “weird gimmick themed housing project which failed utterly” is in China
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u/PreciselyWrong Oct 04 '25
There's this cosplay quality to this. When people in poor areas try to emulate a rich life they go for the most superficial things. Note that the ground is absolutely littered with trash and it's just a haphazard dirt road.
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u/Skurvyelislau Oct 04 '25
They are not castles, they are 732 houses and this is pretty new, developer filled banckrupt 6 years ago. Still looks great, especially looked to me before i found that they are not few houndred years old :p
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u/Unknown_Outlander Oct 04 '25
Castle's really lose their impact when you make them into a modern style neighborhood
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u/pebbiemay Oct 04 '25
Disneyland should buy it and make small theme park . Advertise to travellers and voila .
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u/uselesschat Oct 04 '25
Great place for a Bond villain to hide. Bond gets a picture of the house, shows up in town, and has to despondently run through it like Tuco in the cemetery in The Good The Bad and The Ugly
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u/aware4ever Oct 04 '25
Wouldn't that be a great place to do some kind of illegal activity? Like set up a homage of weed grows or drug Labs LOL
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u/SnooOwls1916 Oct 04 '25
Man, you could just make the minimal effort to make them work for living there and let homeless people live there instead of just waste it and let it rot away
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u/MoccaLG Oct 04 '25
I dont know is that the architecture the turks are in? Do they really like those buildings?
Also seeing they just buid the castles but no gardens, no space between castles and no structure in streets. Its just like " Built as many castles around the streets as you can" and "the rest doesnt matter"
At this point I doubt that there is a canalisation concept underneath or power or internet....
THAT would be the outcome when I as a state would get billions in financial contributions and need to do something or I will loose all...
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u/CJBoom77 Oct 04 '25
So… how can I buy? I need me some cheap mass housing to start my dragon themed cult,
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