Okay, so picture a quasi-gothic kind of chateau or castle, sort of like you'd see in

a fairy tale.

There's a round tower on one side, some ballastrades, a sort of gothic tower in the center,

but it's sort of crossed with like an American-style mcmanchin, cream-colored, a little too many

architectural flourishes, and then take that, and go into Photoshop, and clone stamp it

about 700 times, and put it in a beautiful wooded valley in central Turkey, and you have

an idea of what this place looks like.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, I'm talking with Atlas Obscura's editor-in-chief Samir Patel about bourge al-Babas.

We explore the remnants of an attempt to create a real world fairy tale that went so, so,

wrong, after this.

So, what is this place?

So this place is a luxury housing development.

Well, it's not.

It aspires to be a luxury housing development in Turkey, a few hours from Istanbul, called

the bourge al-Babas.

This housing development was never completed, the company that tried to develop it went

bankrupt, and so, it's sitting there, irritating people.

I mean, are these houses, like, 100% complete clones of each other?

My understanding is there's three different models you could choose to have the pool,

or not the pool inside.

...