In the small Turkish town of Mudurnu sits Burj al-Babas, a community with over 500 abandoned castle-themed mansions. Construction on these homes began in 2014, but eight years later, they sit completely abandoned. How did this $200 million project completely fall apart, and what will happen to it in the future?
In 2014, developers saw a unique opportunity to build a luxury housing community in a small Turkish town called Mudurnu. This was a very unique opportunity, especially for buyers who desired a unique, luxurious home.
The project got off to a great start, and the developers were able to sell more than 350 castle-style houses that were priced between $370,000 and $500,000 each. With a goal to complete the entire project in just four years, 2,500 workers worked day and night to get the project off the ground.
However, things took a sudden turn when Turkey began to experience a financial crisis. Just three years after the project began, the development was left completely abandoned, with materials left everywhere. This project had become a ghost town.
The way that the developers built these mansions was done in a way that was very different from modern development projects today. Instead of finishing one home at a time, all the homes were built one after another, leaving empty concrete shells with none of the interiors finished. Looking from an aerial view, we can see just how strange this community was developed, with each castle extremely close to one another.
Recent close-up images of these homes show just how bad of condition they are actually in. Regardless of the conditions of these abandoned mansions, what can be done to fix this mess in the future? But first, here’s a little backstory on why this project was actually created.
Only a few years after construction began, Turkey’s economy began to go downhill. The developer, the Sarat Group, was forced to file for bankruptcy in November of 2018. This was not the only large development project the Sarat Group was working on, and as the financial crisis worsened, the company could not afford to manage all these costly projects.
As Turkey’s economy works to recover, the developers still claim to have a plan to finish the project. But taking a look at these images and seeing just how bad the condition the homes are in as of now, it looks very unlikely, and this project will most likely never come back to life again.
When viewing this community from satellite imagery, we can see that it is very large and has lots of identical homes. When the Sarat Group was building these homes, they targeted Arabian investors to buy into the community. But when the economy became unstable, most of these investors pulled out of their homes. Even as many people are confident that this project will be brought back to life, hundreds of homes may still sit abandoned, even if the rest of them are finished being built.
Both the mayor and government both agreed that this project is one of a kind and should be completed. Although the community was built in a remote location, the Turkish government has promised to build roads, rail lines, and air links to the region if the project is completed.
Even as some may criticize the architecture of these homes, the location of them, or many other aspects of the project, we need to appreciate just how unique this project actually is and how hard the developers worked to make it a reality.
Especially looking at an image like this one, we can see just how bad these buildings have fallen apart over the past three years. And with the developer having close to $30 million in debt, it’s clear that this project has a long way to go before getting anywhere near completed.
With all these ongoing problems, where does the project go from here, and will anything be done to finish this community? With Mudurnu’s climate bringing very cold winters with snow, we can assume that within a period of time, these mansions will begin to fall apart even more than their current condition.
We can also assume that as Turkey battles inflation for a third year in a row, the developers won’t return to finish the project anytime in the near future. Construction was planned to resume in 2021, but as we can see, that never ended up happening.
Eight years after this project was proposed, it’s better known as a ghost town than an incredible castle-themed community like it had planned to be a few years ago. Even though plans aren’t looking promising for the project to be brought back to life, we can appreciate how passionate the developers were about bringing this project to a reality.
When this project was started and it seemed like an incredible project for the wealthy to buy into, but at a time of economic despair, it just didn’t seem practical for a project this large to be completed.