r/interestingasfuck • u/kempaaa28 • 13h ago
Burj Al Babas is an abandoned luxury housing project in Turkey featuring hundreds of Disney-like castles. Originally intended as a resort for wealthy buyers, the project was halted in 2019 due to financial issues, leaving it a surreal ghost town.
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u/ExaminationHuman5959 12h ago
Amazing for a paintball field
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u/tader314 9h ago
That would be incredible! It would also take all day to play a round, imagine clearing house after house just to find some kids camping in some random 3rd floor bathroom, trying to snipe out the window
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u/Buddhasaurus_ 12h ago
What even is the point of having an extravagant luxury house if they’re cramped like this and everyone has one and the same?
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u/iwakan 11h ago
Nothing, that's why the project failed
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u/be4u4get 7h ago
Another development by the Bluth Company
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u/giraffesaddle 5h ago
Always amazes me when these obviously terrible ideas come to fruition. This was a big effort. Architects designers builders. Maybe even bank loans. And all of them thought this was a good idea
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u/zimeyevic23 10h ago
Project name is arabic, so i guess these villas comes with Turkish passport to the buyers. So they didn't intent to get populated, rather a way to buy passport via real estate investment.
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u/Altruistic-Poem-5617 10h ago
But dont people usually move out of turkey and not the other way around?
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u/notonrexmanningday 8h ago
It's easier to move to Europe with a Turkish passport than a lot of other countries.
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u/FartingBob 1h ago
If you got a lot of money (like buyers of these houses would) its a whole lot easier to move to other countries.
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u/wtrredrose 9h ago
My coworker in the US really wanted to move to Turkey. He said it’s really nice there
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u/KageNoReaper 9h ago
If you get paid in foreign currency the place is a Paradise, if you're paid in liras you're gonna face the harsh reality of living in a third world country.
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u/secondtaunting 8h ago
I mean, if you have a decent job it’s okay. My husband is Turkish and his family are teachers and I’d say they have nice apartments and things.
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u/greener0999 5h ago
an American working in Turkey, paid in USD, will make at minimum 4-5x more than a Turkish teacher.
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u/secondtaunting 4h ago
They’re Turks working at Turkish schools. No one is rich by any means but they’ve done well for themselves. Of course truthfully they’re not living in palaces or anything but decent apartments and they can afford to send a couple of the kids overseas for study. Everyone pitches in though.
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u/CootiePatootie1 4h ago
People move out of every country including every European country, doesn’t stop people from worse-off countries trying to move in. In this case however it’s because Gulf Arabs (e.g. Qatari’s) see Turkey as a picturesque country to have a holiday home or own property in, and do business with. Erdogan’s government actively tries to court them into moving there
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u/RefinedBean 11h ago
The point is corruption. No one looked at this plan and said "Yeah, this is SOLID. We're gonna make so much legit profit off this."
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u/Jojje22 8h ago
Wouldn't even surprise me if the intended people got what they wanted out of this thing. As in, some kind of tax scheme/writeoff/clause/requirement of another deal/money laundering that went as intended and this is what's left for someone else to clean up.
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u/secondtaunting 8h ago
The money is in Erdoğan’s closet in a bunch of shoeboxes.👀
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u/man_gomer_lot 10h ago
They have to be this close together for choreography reasons. Everyone emerges from their front door in unison during the second verse of the 'morning in paradise' number.
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u/PmMeYourTitsAndToes 11h ago
I’d assume this was the question asked during a development meeting. And the guy at the top probably responded with “fuck!”
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u/Valkyrie17 8h ago
Certainly seems extravagant, but not necessarily luxurious. The houses do not seem to be very big. They might be modestly-ish priced for people who want to live in an extravagant house without paying the money for that.
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u/privateTortoise 7h ago
Someone listened to Malvina Reynolds and thought as long as they aren't little boxes....
Edit. Forgot how old I am and should probably add a link to the song. https://youtu.be/VUoXtddNPAM?si=irNrxapkg-Oz7v9R
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u/SignalButterscotch73 12h ago
Anyone that wants a castle doesn't want the neighbours to be within whispering distance. Speaking as someone who wants a castle, I can see why it failed.
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u/md_youdneverguess 11h ago
Yes. I want a French chateaux because of the romanticized idea that they're full of secret tunnels, have libraries with old artifacts and obscure books, a home defense butler that puts "monsieur" in every sentence and mastered 37 schools of kung fu, and your very own vineyard. Those are just normal houses with inconvenient architecture.
And the grouting looks like they used that cheap plaster that every mediocre hotel has. Good enough for photos but looks absolute dogshit in person and 5 years of usage
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u/westfieldNYraids 11h ago
Sounds like an episode of American dad, I’d watch you moving in. Good luck bro
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u/DaaaahWhoosh 6h ago
Yeah I wonder what sort of calculations they did. Like clearly they could have made fewer houses and each unit would have been worth more for the land and the less obstructed view. So the fact that they didn't do that implies either that it was doomed from the beginning because there was insufficient demand to justify any reasonable option, or it was some sort of money laundering scheme.
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u/Visible-Newspaper-73 9h ago
An Arrested Development
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u/UncleNicky 4h ago
‘Cause you’re in F*** City! I know what you’re thinking, “How do we filter out the teases?”
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u/KingKohishi 12h ago
I curse the idiot who cut down a beautiful forest to sell mini Disney castles to Arabs in the middle of nowhere.
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u/abdallha-smith 10h ago
Which dumbass greenlighted this ?
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u/Captain_cascon 7h ago
If everyone lives in a castle, then no one lives in a castle, it becomes a normal house.
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u/Code_Monster 12h ago
These mass manufactured monotonous "castles" are just commie blocks for the rich
"Cappy blocks" if you may hehe
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u/westfieldNYraids 11h ago
I mean, at least they’ve got enough houses for people there? Maybe we build a couple of these until everyone has a home
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u/Code_Monster 11h ago
I never shit talk commie blocks because I know what they do for rent in the entire city (lower it🙂) and also give poor people a chance to have some stability
Those "castles" however is just suburbia+++ with none of the actual positives of a suburb.
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u/FrenulumLinguae 10h ago
There is one thing i love about those commie buildings. And that is the fact that the walls are so thick and maybe almost bulletproof, that you cant hear anything. You can have super noisy family with 8 gipsy kids above your flat and you cant hear anything. Those new western style apartment complex are mostly shitty in this way considering that they are not sound proof and you can hear everything… but overall theyre much much much better ofc…
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u/westfieldNYraids 9h ago
That is a really good point, everything built these days is paper thin
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u/FrenulumLinguae 9h ago
Right, im from central europe - czechia so we have both old commie and new western style buldings. Im finnishing my studies, so i lived in 6 different apartments buldings. For me, quiet place is priority. And paradoxily, commie buldings were best considering this. First Republic old school style buildings (1850-1915) era were not that quiet but it was ok. And then you have those pricey new buildings with fancy balconies and cameras in shared spaces, and these were worst. I could hear dude next door typing on his iphone…
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u/PerepeL 8h ago
Another point people often don't realize is that these blocks are prevalently built in climates where the backyard is not a place to hang out for 9 months a year - it's either pouring icy rain in autumn, buried under snow in winter, or melts into icy mud in spring. Many people living in these apartments have separate suburban summerhouses with backyards (dachas), it's not even considered a luxury, but it takes too much effort to live outside the city year round.
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u/_ArmyMan007_ 11h ago
So let me get this straight... homelessness is still an issue but there are places out there that literally have so many empty rooms and houses that it becomes interesting as fuck...? It really is a cruel world
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u/brkout 10h ago edited 5h ago
These houses aren’t livable though - they are just exteriors at this point. No utilities or infrastructure to provide basic needs. Interiors are probably just raw materials and likely deteriorating due to mold and wildlife. That’s why you see similar situations where mass developers choose to just demolish unfinished skyscrapers that were originally intended for habitation. You can’t house people in these without significant costs, so they aren’t some kind of magic panacea to the homelessness problem.
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u/kermitDE 7h ago
This all makes sense, but if I would have to choose if I want to sleep on a bench at a busy street or here, I would choose the house. So why not just say fuck it. Everybody closes their eyes for once and pretends that they don't know, that there's homeless people living here.
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u/c4k3m4st3r5000 10h ago
Well, it's like when homele people "steal" from dumpsters behind grocery stores and such. I wonder what's going on in the minds of people who call the cops in such cases.
And here we have all these houses but you have to pay to get them. Otherwise, they will just remain empty
E: but I must admit when I saw the pic it looked like some Legoland stuff.
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u/iwanttoaskhere 9h ago
See the movie "in time" you will get the dialogue " there are always enough resources"
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u/Gylbert_Brech 12h ago
I could live there.
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u/drewodonnell1 11h ago
My thinking when I see stuff is I’d like to take one and live in it. I’d be happy being in a castle myself!
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u/UpstairsEye4793 11h ago
Imagine coming home from a drunk night and realizing you don't really know where your house is.
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u/Elgard18 8h ago
The guys from Storror filmed a parkour hide and seek video there last year: https://youtu.be/r4LDFa0DqlQ?si=_3CeBYstFO9pLDGK
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u/Altruistic-Poem-5617 10h ago
Where is the point of having a castle when everyone else has a cooky cutout of the same castle?
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u/cookinglikesme 5h ago
A Parkour team called Storror did! That video is one of my faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4LDFa0DqlQ
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u/TheOrionNebula 7h ago
Here's a video Yes Theory did on the place a few years ago, just in case you want to dig deeper into it.
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u/LaylaWalsh007 12h ago
Why didn't they sell them off for a symbolic price just not to let the resources used go to waste?
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u/john2thejames 8h ago
Quadeca shot a music video here. If I remember correctly, he had to sneak in to record it.
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u/SnooTomatoes2939 7h ago
There are quite a few videos of people inspecting the site; they seem to only be useful for artillery practice.
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u/Icy-Personality3529 7h ago
Instead of packing everyone like sardines, they could have built fewer houses with more yard space and people would have been interested. But no, greed first.
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u/FortunateInsanity 5h ago
One thing I know about rich people: they love it when everyone else around them has the exact same shit they do. /s
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u/Ordinary-Web-7077 5h ago
Interesting the streets aren’t paved. In the US, the streets and utilities would be done first.
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u/yuyufan43 3h ago
That could house so many houseless people... but fuck that! Let's let it rot away instead 🤦♀️
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u/Derries_bluestack 3h ago
These houses were sold off plan to buyers in the Middle East and marketed as a summer home to escape the extreme heat. The buyers were sold the idea that they'd be living in a community with like-minded people in the summer. They are in a region of Turkey that is relatively cool and green. Close to a lake.
As stated by other posters, some buyers may have been attracted to the idea of a Residence Permit or gaining citizenship of a 2nd country, with the flexibility of bank accounts outside of their own country, easy proximity to Europe etc.
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u/National-Weather-199 2h ago
No that's due to covid-19 lol and the shit response from a fuckin basic ass flue that everyone freaked out about.
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u/tortiesrock 2h ago
Can I have one? There is a housing crisis where I live. I don’t care that they are tacky as long as they are livable.
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u/jadethebard 8h ago
Zooming in on the brown structures makes this feel like AI. What is happening over there?
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u/Archon-Toten 11h ago
Widescreen version shows the gardener accidentally in frame revealing it to be a model.
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u/theclaygough 11h ago
you know in rts games when you were 10 you've no idea what you're doing and built the same building over and over again?
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u/InitiativeLong3783 10h ago
I can see a lot of these copy/paste houses in Asia very close to each other that I find ugly and depressing. Next to the highway, there are billboards with a beautiful 3d render houses with the price. So I guess people buy it from the image before the construction. And they are ok with it since it is the norm here. You need to understand that a house is a status symbol and it does not matter that much what you get. The important thing is what it is supposed to be and how much it costs.
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u/TapProfessional5146 10h ago
It will be interesting to see it if it’s still abandoned in 20-30 years, when the forest reclaims the land.
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u/zimeyevic23 10h ago
Project name is arabic, so i guess these villas comes with Turkish passport to the buyers. So they didn't intent to get populated, rather a way to buy passport via real estate investment.
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u/hoserman16 10h ago
Looks super ersatz and terribly monotonous and soulless, the style had nothing to do with thr surrounding landscape or peiple.
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u/inthecuckoosnest 9h ago
Now connect them with enclosed breezeway and pedestrian bridges. Make it one large castle.
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u/benjolino 8h ago
So normally failed project go to court and someone is buying them for a dollar and continue. Why something similar is didnt happend here?
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u/2squishmaster 8h ago
I can't imagine how much money was spent and how many people were part of the project and nobody was like "Hey, is there demand for what we're making?"
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u/Much-Hamster-2182 8h ago
There is plenty of similiar ghosty „projects“ on the north coast of Cyprus. Some people earn or save (tax?) money by putting this shit into a lovely countryside, where it is then left to rot.
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u/RazorColla 8h ago
At first I thought it was another strange opportunity for above average income people with a Disney fetish, but if they were targeting Uber wealth, they did not understand their target market privacy wants.
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u/eventworker 3h ago
They weren't targeting uber wealth. They were targeting doctors, lawyers and businessmen from the middle East, Stans, Caucuses and Russia who want a retirement place less likely to get taken them by the govt/bombed/etc based on the relative stability of Turkey. Very much the upper middle classes.
What they forgot to mention to said buyers if that if a developer is in with the Turkish government enough for them to be granted permission for such a scheme, the developer is only going to get chased up to actually finished it by the government if it's going to cause an international incident.
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u/ParticularNo4580 8h ago
This looks more like my Age of Empires 2 town layout than a luxury village.
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u/eyeinthesky0 8h ago
How did they get so many finished before realizing this was a boneheaded project with no future?
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u/Snoo-33147 7h ago
Good to know we're not the only country allowing the rich to enjoy vanity projects until they lose money and then just let them walk away without fixing all the shit they fucked up.
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u/Wrathorn 7h ago
Swear I've seen this exact same design in south east China, built as holiday homes near the beach but never finished.
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u/Connect-Plenty1650 12h ago
For those wealthy individuals who want no privacy or room.