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ABANDONED PLACES

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Cover Image: Inside Buzludzha Monument

© Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

CONTENTS

Places listed chronologically by the approximate date by which they became abandoned

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Petra

Machu Picchu

Easter Island

Ani

Mandu

Ross Island

Stelling van Amsterdam

Kayaköy

Sonargaon

St Kilda

Bokor Hill Station

Red Sands Sea Forts

Bodie

Tyneham

Oradour-sur-Glane

Giersdorf Church

Graun

Waiuta

Kolmanskop

Detroit

Lion City

Humberstone & Santa Laura

Chinguetti

North Brother Island

Craco

Chittagong

L’Île-aux-Marins

Leith Harbour & Grytviken

Wittenoom

Poveglia

Canfranc Station

Eastern State Penitentiary

Varosha

Hashima Island

Tatooine

Sanzhi UFO Houses

Millennium Mills

Buzludzha Monument

Epecuén

Pripyat

Centralia

Young Pioneer Camp

Juragua

Rosario Island Villas

London Underground Stations

Plymouth

Hotel del Salto

Beelitz Sanatorium

Objekt 825

Sathorn Unique

Macassar Beach Pavilion

Pyramiden

Larundel Asylum

Saddam’s Palaces

Mirabel Airport

Athens Olympic Venues

Six Flags Jazzland

Tampico

Nara Dreamland

Kangbashi New Area

Index

About the Publisher

From Antarctic bays bound by a frozen sea to the most parched deserts on earth, from monsoon-drenched estuaries to wind-whipped Atlantic islands, there are places that humans have settled, thrived in, and then abruptly departed from. These abandoned places lie deep underground, on the highest mountain tops, in the middle of our biggest cities, in our suburbs, on our doorsteps. They are all around us, but most of the time we pass them by. Yet when we take the time to look, to explore, we find new worlds that are endlessly fascinating. What brought people to this place? How did they survive? What was life here really like? Perhaps most intriguingly of all – why did they leave?

That question is answered in myriad ways. War. Natural disaster. Economic pressure. Fashion. Political gamesmanship. Greener grass elsewhere. Human foolishness. Every derelict settlement is an empire in miniature that tells its own story of glorious rise and humble fall. Here we present sixty of those intriguing tales, illustrated with photographs that perfectly capture the haunting echoes of lives long forgotten. If there can be no true beauty without decay, then these abandoned places are, in their way, some of the most beautiful places on earth.

PETRA

DATE ABANDONED: AD 663

TYPE OF PLACE: City

LOCATION: Jordan

REASON: Environmental/Economic

INHABITANTS: 20,000

CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site

THREE CENTURIES BEFORE CHRIST’S BIRTH, A TRIBE OF NOMADS DECIDED TO CUT THEMSELVES A CITY FROM BARE ROCK. ABANDONED AND LOST FOR A MILLENNIUM, THEIR CAPITAL WAS REDISCOVERED IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND IS NOW RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S OUTSTANDING CULTURAL WONDERS.

The rose-red city half as old as time

It is called Petra in Greek and Sela in Hebrew; both mean ‘rock’ and few places have as simple and as beautifully apt a name. For this city that once housed 20,000 prosperous souls was carved out of, and into, the red sandstone cliffs of a desert gorge over 2,000 years ago.

Most abandoned places have a short life. It is the very nature of their derelict existence: they have been let go, lost, left to the entropic power of nature. Petra, however, is almost as magnificent now as it was two millennia ago.

It is mentioned twice in the Bible and Arab tradition maintains that Petra is where Moses (Musa) struck his staff on a rock and water came forth. Even then it was a wonder: one of the wealthiest cities in the ancient world flourishing in one of the harshest climates on earth. Today it is a magnificently preserved picture of an ancient civilization and a thrilling reminder that not everything we abandon need be lost.

The wanderers settle down

The Nabataeans were originally nomadic spice traders of the south Levant and north Arabia. They controlled a loosely structured trade network with oases as hubs linked by caravan routes through the surrounding desert.

Around 300 BC, they decided to develop a more state-like kingdom and swiftly constructed Petra as their capital city. The fortress-like location of towering rocks and narrow gullies certainly made for a wonderful defensive site, but there was one major problem: water.

Water management

It may be surrounded on all sides by dry, searing desert, but Petra owes its existence to water. Or rather, to the skill and ingenuity of the Nabataeans in gathering that most precious of commodities and bringing it to their city. When rain does fall here, it creates flash floods that rip through the landscape, carving its distinctive gullies and gorges. For most people that rain would be too rare and too destructive to be of any use.

The Nabataeans thought differently, and they built an ingenious system of conduits, dams, cisterns and pipes to channel and store the rain and spring water from a wide area. This vast plumbing network turned a meagre 15 cm (6 inches) of annual precipitation into a constant water supply that could deliver an estimated 12 million gallons of fresh water a day. In effect, they had created an artificial oasis. Its water supported the people of Petra – and was vital to travellers, which helped make the city rich.

The façade of Al Khazneh (‘The Treasury’) is 40 m (131 ft) high. Its position deep in a gorge has helped protect it from erosion.

The Urn Tomb, first of the Royal Tombs, is built high up on the mountain side.

Petra was located at the junction of a trade route to Asia and another to Arabia. These were the motorways of their day, along which caravans of 2,500 camels, up to 8 km (5 miles) in length, carried spices, cloth, ivory, metals and incense such as frankincense and myrrh. Petra was an ideal rest and refreshment point for these travellers and, as with any service station, the Nabataeans ensured they profited from their visitors.

By 100 BC the Nabataeans had control of the spice trade and they used their burgeoning wealth to expand their remarkable city. Petra became a metropolis of temples, monuments, altars, houses, and banquet halls carved into the sandstone cliffs. There are 3,000 carved tombs and the open-air theatre could seat 8,000 people.

The rock shakes

Like all empires, the Nabataean dynasty eventually had its fall. Petra was taken within the arms of the Roman Empire in AD 106 and at first flourished in the relationship; the city was at the height of its wealth and influence around AD 200. However, the city of Palmyra gradually drew Arabian trade away from Petra, which declined as a trading hub.

In AD 363 there was a cataclysmic earthquake that cracked beautifully carved facades, brought rocks tumbling from walls and fractured the seats in the theatre. Although people continued to live here, the city never fully recovered from this shock.

By the fifth century the Nabataeans had converted from their own faith to Christianity and Petra became a renowned religious settlement within the Byzantine realm. But by AD 663 even the pilgrims had ceased to come and the city was deserted.

The city lives again

The city slept in its desert canyon for nearly a millennium, forgotten by the wider world. It was rediscovered by an adventurous 27-year-old Swiss traveller, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, in 1812. He spent years learning fluent Arabic and had disguised himself as a Bedouin to explore as far off the beaten track as possible. Tales of the lost city’s mystical beauty captured the Victorian imagination, and it was famously described as ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’ in a poem by John William Burgon.

In the First World War, Petra was at the centre of an Arabian revolt against the Ottoman regime. British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, helped drum up support amongst the Bedouins living in the area to rout the Turkish forces.

The Treasury by night. Behind the facade is a large square room; Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail inside.

Exploring the site

Few cities on earth have as spectacular an entrance as Petra. It is approached through the Siq, a sinuous gorge that snakes for 1.2 km (0.75 miles) between gloomy cliffs up to 182 m (597 ft) high. In some places the Siq (meaning ‘the Shaft’) is only 3 m (9.8 ft) wide, but this split in the mountain is the main way of accessing the city.

Visitors pad through the sandy darkness to finally emerge in a blinding cathedral of light and come face to face with one of Petra’s most famous monuments: Al Khazneh (‘The Treasury’). This was not a place of business, but rather a crypt built around the time of Christ. It later got its name from a story about bandits who had hidden gold in one of the urns carved high on the facade. Today this urn is pocked with bullet holes made by Bedouins trying to shatter it and release the treasure. In fact, the urn is solid sandstone. The Treasury’s huge pillars and pediment are of Greek influence in their design, like many of the buildings in Petra.

Another spectacular carved building is the monastery (actually a temple), which is cut into a hilltop an hour’s climb from the main city. The scale of the stone-carving here is truly awe-inspiring: the monastery’s huge facade is 50 m (165 ft) square and its doorway is as tall as most houses.

Cut into Petra’s East Cliff are the Royal Tombs, a group of large and impressive facades. In the warm ruby light of late afternoon the whole cliff here seems to shimmer and glow.

The secrets that sleep on

Film lovers will be aware of Petra’s starring role in many motion pictures. These appearances, and its regular inclusion in new ‘Wonders of the World’ lists, have widened its fame and made it one of the best known abandoned places. Today, Petra is the most visited place in Jordan and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

However, one of the most intriguing things about Petra is how much more of it is yet to be discovered. Only 15 per cent of the city has been explored by archaeologists; the vast majority remains underground and untouched, as it has been since antiquity.

MACHU PICCHU

DATE ABANDONED: Sixteenth century

TYPE OF PLACE: Inca city

LOCATION: Peru

REASON: Disease/Invasion

INHABITANTS: c. 1,000

CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site

CROWNING A SHEER-SIDED PERUVIAN MOUNTAIN IS MACHU PICCHU, AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPRESSION OF ENGINEERING SKILL AND RELIGIOUS DEVOTION THAT WAS ABANDONED ONLY 100 YEARS AFTER ITS CONSTRUCTION. THE INVADING SPANISH NEVER FOUND THE CITY, BUT THE DESTRUCTION THEY BROUGHT KILLED IT NONETHELESS.

The palace in the peaks

It was a royal Inca estate and religious retreat that just happened to be perched on a precipitous mountain ridge at 2,430 m (7,970 ft) above sea level. Machu Picchu was completed around 1450, and flourished as a self-sustaining stronghold of 1,000 souls for 100 years. Then it was abruptly abandoned during a time of catastrophic population collapse. Today its enigmatic remains are among the most beautiful and spectacular of all lost civilizations.

It’s hard to imagine a site with better natural defensive protection. The Urubamba River encircles the site on three sides, at the bottom of cliffs that drop vertically for 450 m (1,480 ft). On the fourth side is a nearly impassable mountain peak.

There was a secret entrance via rope bridge, known only to the Inca army. If an offensive army were to approach they would be seen miles away. When they arrived they would have an unpleasant climb up a near-sheer, heavily vegetated cliff face. Any attempt to starve out the inhabitants would be doomed to failure – the city had enough arable land within its walls to feed its population four times over, and fresh water is not a problem in this misty, rainy area.

The design of the city itself is ingenious. The high hillsides were cut into terraces, to increase the arable land available and to decrease the incidence of landslides. As well as the agricultural zone, Machu Picchu had an urban area. Here were temples, palaces, workshops, storehouses and homes made of expertly dressed stone. Blocks, some weighing up to 50 tonnes, were cut with millimetre-precision to form faultless joints without the use of any mortar. In many places a small gap has been left in the stonework to allow walls to move and flex in an earthquake, thus absorbing much of the destructive force.

Mountain-worship rituals

Religion was part of the everyday fabric of Inca life and Machu Picchu itself was a physical expression of their beliefs. This was a city-shrine to the gods, a clifftop cathedral that stood in symbiosis with the mountain landscape surrounding it. There are several ‘replica stones’ throughout the city; these have been sculpted to echo the shape of the mountain peaks behind them. They were likely a sign of the Incas’ devotion to the mountain god Apo.

The Intiwatana stone was an astronomic clock or calendar with a protruding gnomon that cast a shadow onto a broad base; the positioning of the shadow marked the June and December solstices. The stone also functioned as an altar.

The end of an ancient empire

When a fleet of Spanish ships reached the Spanish colony in Panama in 1520, on board were diseases unknown in the Americas. Smallpox, measles and other contagions ripped through the native populations.

The Inca Empire was then at its height under the ruler Huayna Capac. It stretched for a thousand miles from north to south (covering much of present-day Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Colombia), and incorporated 200 different ethnic groups.

The Spanish didn’t get to Peru until 1532, when Francisco Pizarro landed on the north coast with 260 fellow Spaniards. By that time, however, smallpox, measles and civil war had already killed millions of people – two-thirds of the population of this vast empire perished. The great leader Capac was one of the dead, and his passing divided the Inca Empire; a brutal civil war erupted over which of his sons would rule.

The mighty Inca armies were in disarray and the carefully organized state administration was in tatters. The Spanish started looting the temples and palaces in a virtual gold rush, as well as killing the Inca leaders.

No men for maintenance

Travel routes in the mountainous area around Machu Picchu require constant maintenance to be kept open. The area gets more than 1.8 m (70 inches) of rain a year, which frequently washes away roads and trails. Fast-growing vegetation will block cleared trails in a season. Even the modern roads and railway are regularly breached by rockslides and water damage. With the available manpower slashed by plague and war, maintaining such an exotic settlement as Machu Picchu was simply not a priority to the fractured Inca state.

There was a large rebellion against the controlling Spanish in 1536. As the Spanish fought to quell the uprising, many Inca fled into the remote Peruvian hinterlands. To discourage Spanish pursuit, many tracks and settlements were deliberately destroyed, including those at the start of the now famous Inca Trail that leads to Machu Picchu. The city itself would by now have been overgrown by vegetation and the route in to it blocked by landslides.

No one told the Spanish about its location and they never found it themselves, neither then nor at any point during the colonial period. Machu Picchu would be lost to the outside world for nearly four centuries.

‘Indiana’ Bingham

‘It seemed almost incredible that this city [Machu Picchu], only five days’ journey from Cuzco, should have remained so long undescribed and comparatively unknown.’

Hiram Bingham, writing in Harper’s Monthly, 1913

The best-known narrative of the rediscovery is a tale that truly fires the imagination. Hiram Bingham III was a mountaineer, explorer and Yale University academic who led an American expedition that planned to outdo the discoveries of famous British travellers such as David Livingstone.

In 1911 he led a group that set out from Cuzco in search of lost Inca cities. Bingham got lucky, receiving a tip-off from a local about some hilltop ruins deep in the jungle. On a humid July afternoon, Bingham traversed plunging rapids on a log bridge, hacked his way up a jungled slope and finally crested a rocky promontory, to suddenly clap eyes on the magnificent remains of Machu Picchu.

He may not have been the first outsider to visit the lost city, but he was the first to fully explore its treasures, and it was he who made it known to the wider world. On a second visit to the site he cleared the ruins of vegetation and photographed the city. Although Bingham also promptly removed cartloads of artefacts, mummies, stone carvings and other precious Inca relics, he was at least an academic and much of the booty ended up at Yale, where it could be studied and preserved. He wrote about his finds in the National Geographic, and the world at large was entranced by this lost Inca city in the jungle.

Educated, bold and handsome, it was Bingham who became the real-life model for the fictional bullwhip-cracking adventurer Indiana Jones.

The story in the stones

Machu Picchu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a favourite destination of travellers to South America. To most visitors it will never seem at all abandoned. Its story, however, is a sobering one of disease, dereliction and the downfall of one of the world’s greatest ever empires.

EASTER ISLAND

DATE ABANDONED: 1550–1700

TYPE OF PLACE: Island

LOCATION: Pacific Ocean

REASON: Man-made ecological disaster

INHABITANTS: 15,000

CURRENT STATUS: UNESCO World Heritage Site

TO THE FIRST VISITORS IT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF ABANDONMENT. A CIVILIZATION BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE SEA HAD APPARENTLY BEEN CREATED AND THEN HAD CHILLINGLY DECLINED – BUT THE TRUTH OF WHERE ITS PEOPLE WENT IS MORE FRIGHTENING THAN THE MYSTERY.

Where did the sculptors go?

‘These stone figures caused us to be filled with wonder, for we could not understand how it was possible that people who are destitute of heavy or thick timber, and also of stout cordage, out of which to construct gear, had been able to erect them.’

So wrote the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday, 1722. He had just landed on a rather barren isle with no large trees and a population of around 2,000 people. They had few tools and no mechanical devices. They did not know about the wheel. Their canoes were flimsy and so poorly constructed that they had to be constantly baled out just to stay afloat.

Yet Roggeveen was astonished to see that the island was dotted with hundreds of gigantic stone statues. The islanders had worshipped these moai, by lighting fires at their bases and prostrating themselves to the rising sun.

There were no trees – so how could the inhabitants have made timber for scaffolding and rollers, or thick ropes for hauling the stones? How could a society that was struggling for food spare the time to make and move these gargantuan statues? They obviously couldn’t, and yet the statues were all upright, clear of vegetation and relatively unweathered. This proved that a great civilization had occupied the island in the very recent past. So where had it gone?

Later explorers found a factory-quarry where the moai were cut out of tuff, a compressed volcanic ash. There were dozens of incomplete moai half cut from the rock. Stone tools littered the quarry floor. Several completed moai stood outside the quarry ready for transport to their destination. Had a creative, determined and accomplished people just upped and vanished?

Easter Island is unique among deserted settlements in that it presented its abandonment as a mystery to be solved.

Brave new world

One of the most remarkable things about Easter Island is that it was ever inhabited in the first place. It is one of the most remote populated islands in the world: the nearest inhabited place is Pitcairn Island 2,075 km (1,289 miles) away, while the closest point on the Chilean mainland is 3,512 km (2,182 miles) away.

Moai lined up on their ahu – they face inland.

The only source of fresh water on the island: a volcanic crater.

Humanity first arrived here by canoe from the Marquesas Islands, 3,200 km (2,000 miles) to the west, in AD 1200. At first, life was good for the Rapa Nui, as the inhabitants were known. Pollen analysis has shown that the island was once thickly wooded, and had at least three tree species that grew up to 15 m (49 ft) high. Palms could be felled for the building of large canoes, and the hauhau tree could be used to make ropes. There was an abundance of nesting seabirds and fish. Sturdy canoes enabled the fishermen to take porpoises, which became a vital part of the islanders’ diet.

With ample food for survival the population surged as high as 15,000–20,000. The Rapa Nui had spare time, which they spent making moai. This process was not easy and required great organization: the best stone to carve figures from was found at one site; the preferred rock for the headpieces in a different quarry. The tools were made in yet another location.

Moai abandoned before they reached their ahu (coastal platforms).

Images of the dead

The Rapa Nui sculpted 887 moai. The completed figures were transported over rough, hilly ground to sites all around the island’s coast. There are competing theories about how this was done. The prevailing thinking was that great numbers of trees were felled to create rollers. The moai were then placed on skids or sleds and pulled across the rollers. Other studies maintain that they were walked to their destinations using a rocking technique controlled by teams using ropes.

At their destination they were placed on stone platforms and aligned to face the island’s interior. They were erected to represent the spirits of ancestors, watching over their descendants.

The tallest moai that the islanders erected stood 10 m (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes; but a partially carved sculpture, found abandoned in the quarry, would have stood 21 m (69 ft) high and weighed 270 tonnes.

The island’s population was organized into clans, and moai creation became an artistic battle for tribal bragging rights: the clan that erected the largest and greatest number of moai could claim the highest status.

As moai production spiralled into a virtual frenzy, huge numbers of mature trees must have been brought down. Trees were also being used as fuel for fires and being felled to create fields. The consumption of natural resources began to exceed the rate at which those resources could be regrown. Around the year 1500, the shortage of trees meant many people were living in caves rather than huts. A century later the island was almost completely deforested.

There will have been a point when the islanders realized they were in trouble. The island is only 20 km (12 miles) across and its central peak has a commanding view. It would have been easy to see where the remaining groves of trees were. The man who felled the last tree must have known the irreversible step he was taking.

Now no more moai could be erected. No more canoes could be built, so there would be no more porpoise to eat and no exodus to a promised land.

The loss of the trees also led to the depletion of nutrients in the soil, which reduced crop yield. Food became scarce. Society could no longer afford the luxury of statue-building and so it stopped. With its resources stripped, the island could not support 15,000 people. The Rapa Nui began to die.

A hard lesson to learn

The mysterious abandonment found by the Europeans was therefore more of a slow suicide – and a sobering example of how devastating a man-made ecological disaster can be. In just 400 years a fertile island paradise had been stripped to a husk.

Unfortunately for the Rapa Nui, life was about to get even worse. Slave raids from Peru, diseases brought by visitors and maltreatment all reduced the population further. By 1877 there were only 111 people on the island.

The island’s history since then has been far from straightforward, but today there are 5,800 inhabitants with descendants of the Rapa Nui accounting for around 60 per cent of the population.

Modern-day visitors make the five hour plane trip out into the Pacific to find a strikingly beautiful island with dramatic cliffs, plunging headlands and rolling swards of grass.

They also marvel at the abandoned moai, the physical remains of a ghost culture. The sculptors left testaments to their industry and ingenuity, but precious few explanations for their actions. For the strange irony of the Rapa Nui is that they adapted to live in relative ease so far from other cultures as to be in another world, and yet they couldn’t live with themselves.

Will future civilizations wonder where we went?

ANI

DATE ABANDONED: Eighteenth century

TYPE OF PLACE: Medieval city

LOCATION: Turkey

REASON: Political

INHABITANTS: c. 200,000

CURRENT STATUS: Ruined

A MILLENNIUM AGO THIS WAS THE CAPITAL CITY OF AN EMPIRE THAT STRETCHED FOR HUNDREDS OF KILOMETRES ACROSS EURASIA. IT SURVIVED VIOLENT CENTURIES OF CLASHING KINGS ONLY TO BE FORGOTTEN WHEN THOSE EMPIRES THEMSELVES FADED. NOW IT LIVES ON IN RUINS, FAR FROM THE TOURIST ATTRACTIONS OF TURKEY, A GILDED SHADOW OF ITS FORMER POWER AND GLORY.

The medieval megacity

There were few more magnificent cities anywhere in the world in AD 1000. Perhaps Baghdad could boast the same architectural majesty, and maybe Constantinople had a similar wealth of international trade. But Rome was in ruins, London was a mere Saxon market town and New York was a wooded island. This is Ani: the key military stronghold, the capital city and the cultural heart of a mighty Armenian empire.

Ani lies deep in eastern Turkey, over 1,450 km (900 miles) from Istanbul. Even the nearest town, Kars, is 48 km (30 miles) away. There is precious little in the hinterland but sheep and goats. The plains here roll on and on in every direction, only ended at last by a horizon of slumbering mountains. This feels a long way from civilization; yet a millennium ago it was the centre of one.

The city of 1001 churches

Just before the Norman kings expanded their rule into England, the Bagratuni royal dynasty was crushing local tribal leaders in the area between the Black Sea, Caspian Sea and eastern Mediterranean to create an empire of their own. From AD 961 to AD 1045, Ani was the undisputed capital city of a kingdom that stretched for over 800 km (500 miles) from west to east and 600 km (373 miles) from north to south – a territory that would now include Armenia, eastern Turkey and parts of Azerbaijan, Georgia and northern Iran.

The city was blessed with a superb defensive situation: a steep-sided triangular plateau rising from the ravine of the Akhurian River and the Bostanlar Valley. It also happened to lie at a nexus of trade routes that connected Syria and Byzantium with Persia and Central Asia. The canny Bagratuni capitalized on this location to transform the city into a trade hub close to the Silk Road.

When the seat of Armenian Catholicism relocated to Ani in 992, the city also became the centre of a religious golden age. Churches popped up like desert flowers after a flood, and there were no fewer than twelve bishops within the city leading the faithful in prayer. Ani was famous throughout the region as the ‘City of 1001 Churches’ and the ‘City of Forty Gates’. It was also the sacred resting place of the Bagratuni kings, with an extensive royal mausoleum. The city’s population grew from around 50,000 in the tenth century to well over 100,000 a hundred years later. It probably topped 200,000 at its peak.

Earthquakes have shattered the abandoned churches, mosques and walls of Ani.

Trophy of the empire builders

The city’s strategic location made it a pawn in a vast Eurasian game of chess. It was fought over, sacrificed, taken, even promoted to the status of a queen. The names of the nations fighting changed over the centuries, but Ani saw them all come and go.

From 1044 it came under a wave of Byzantine attacks. In 1064 the town was captured and the inhabitants put to the sword by Seljuk Turks. Over the next 200 years it was owned by Muslim Kurds, Georgians and then Mongols. In the fourteenth century Ani was ruled by another Turkish dynasty, and then the Persians took over, before it became part of the mighty Ottoman Empire in 1579.

By now the city’s day in the sun was dimming into its twilight. The earth’s great empires now lay elsewhere. By the time the site was completely abandoned in 1750, there was only the equivalent of a small town left within the walls.

Lost and found

Ani slumbered in its little nook for a century or so. It was then rediscovered by delighted archaeologists and excavated in 1893. Several thousand of its most important treasures were uncovered and removed before the site could be looted, as happened in the First World War. At the end of that conflict the city was briefly back in Armenian hands before finally being incorporated into Turkey in 1921.

Today the best-preserved monument in the city is the church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents, completed in 1215. On its outer walls, elaborate animal carvings frame panels filled with ancient text. Inside, its frescos still shine with azure, gold and crimson hues as daylight floods the chamber through windows high in the central tower.

Several other churches stand in various states of preservation. A couple look ready to welcome worshippers; some are cloaked in grasses and lichens. The Church of the Redeemer stands like one half of a huge nutshell, its inside exposed to the elements; the church was cleaved in two by a lightning bolt in the 1950s. The rubble from the fallen half has been heaped forlornly in a poor attempt at protecting the half that remains standing.

The Cathedral of Ani has fared better. This architecturally stunning building was completed in AD 1001 and is famed for its pointed arches and clustered piers. These long predate the gothic style of architecture, which would eventually make such features commonplace.

Just down the street from the cathedral is the mosque of Minuchir, the first mosque to be built on the Anatolian plateau. Its 1,000-year-old minaret survives intact along with much of its prayer hall.

Ani was once encircled by powerful defensive walls, and many of these battlements and towers still stand. The walls were doubled in thickness at the northern side where the city was not protected by a river or ravine. Today these sections remain . . . ready to face an enemy that will never come.

There are also the remains of a convent, bathhouses, palaces, streets with shops and ordinary homes, and the abutments of a single-arched bridge over the Arpa River. A few minutes’ walk away in the gorge is an early solution to urban overcrowding – a satellite town of caves cut into the cliffs. The same high architectural standards are evident here: there is even a cave church with frescoes on its walls and ceiling.

The city’s future survival

Earthquakes in 1319, 1832, and 1988, as well as blasting in a nearby quarry and even target practice by the army have all damaged the city’s ancient architecture. Some ham-fisted repair work has done more harm than good. Currently, the city is on the ‘at risk’ register of the World Monuments Fund.

Ani’s sovereignty, meanwhile, remains contested. Today the ruins sit just inside Turkey; Armenia lies a piece of rubble’s throw away across a disputed frontier. Although open to visitors, it remains fenced off in a Turkish military enclave. History would suggest that this may not always remain the case. Ani may have been forgotten by the world at large for several centuries, but the Armenians have always remembered. One day they may yet reclaim their ancient city.

The church of St Gregory of Tigran Honents looks out over the river gorge and the empty plain beyond.

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