Featured Image Credit: Chris McGrath / Staff / Getty
Dreamland has quickly turned into a nightmare for this Turkish town, as a complex of 732 'Disney-like' castles has remained abandoned and unfinished for over a decade.
Typically you'd expect abandoned areas to be remnants of ancient civilizations or embodiments of a major historical event, but for one particular fantasy development the issues are far stranger - and more recent.
This has left a small town in the northwest of Türkiye in the shadow of a housing graveyard, and with no movement either way, there's little in the way of resolution in sight.
Burj Al Babas, located just outside of Mudurnu in the Black Sea region of Türkiye, houses 732 nearly identical castle-like structures, and began construction in 2014.
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These houses, developed by the Sarot Group, were marketed as luxury villas and aimed at prospective homeowners in Gulf states who wanted a slightly cooler area for the summer.
Each home was to be fitted with a direct pipeline to the area's local hot springs, allowing for fantastic baths and wonderfully heated pools in the comfort of your own home.
Around half the homes were sold ahead of construction starting, with prices ranging from around $370,000 to $530,000, yet buyers have got little back for their investment, even 10 years on.
While construction was officially abandoned in 2019, after Sarot Group filed for bankruptcy, issues began all the way back in year one.
It was alleged that the construction company had breached environmental laws, that workers hadn't been paid - leading to protest and even threats of suicide, and construction quickly fell behind schedule due to poor weather and the 2016 Turkish coup.
Even in as recently as 2023, as reported by the Guardian, there remained a pretense that things were all going to plan, and everything would be up and running again soon.
One unenthusiastic tour guide explained: "It gets cold in the winter, so we stopped construction. We're prepared to restart next summer."
Yet Burj Al Babas remains still incomplete, inhabitable, and a veritable ghost town.
None of the castles have been finished, and over half of them remain just a fraction of the way towards completion, and the site has since drawn far more attention from social media than prospective homeowners.
It's perhaps not all over yet though, as summer 2024 saw Turkish president Erdoğan and Sheikh Meshal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, emir of Kuwait, met and agreed on a resolution of sorts.
'Warm blood' has supposedly been pumped into the issue, as the Sabot Group's 14 companies have been entrusted a state fund to 'rectify the financial situation' of troubled business in Turkey, which could see the Burj Al Babas project reignited.
If trends over the past decade are to be repeated then ghosts could still inhabit the area, but if you've ever wanted a half-built castle in the Turkish countryside then maybe now's the time to buy.
