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Baalbek

added28 August 2026

A Roman temple complex in Lebanon standing on a base of megaliths weighing up to 800 tonnes. Exactly how those blocks were moved is not settled — which is what fuels the stream of alternative theories about them.

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34.00634, 36.20732

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Varosha

A resort quarter of Famagusta, Cyprus, hastily abandoned in 1974 and fenced off. For half a century its beachfront hotels have been crumbling behind barbed wire.

240 km away

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Göbekli Tepe

A sanctuary in south-eastern Turkey around 11,500 years old — older than farming, pottery or the wheel. Its circles of T-shaped pillars carved with animals upended assumptions about what came first, the temple or the town.

434 km away

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Wadi Rum

A sandstone desert in southern Jordan that the Bedouin call the Valley of the Moon. Its rocks carry twenty-five thousand petroglyphs and twenty thousand inscriptions, the oldest twelve thousand years old. Bedouin tradition fills the gorges with jinn, and the place obliges: the temperature difference between sun and shade reaches twenty degrees, and in the narrow canyons your own footsteps come back with a delay.

496 km away

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