Second visit, three years after the first, and the difference is grim. Water has got into the upper floor and taken the ceiling with it. Whatever you were planning to photograph here, do it now or don't bother.
Three hundred roofless houses stepping up a hillside, and two churches.
Abandoned✓ VERIFIED
Kayaköy
Five hundred roofless houses left by a population exchange
Region
Muğla, Türkiye
Coordinates
36.5747, 29.0917
Access
Open access
Risk
Care needed
185
The record
A Greek Orthodox town of around 10,000 until the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey emptied it. Never resettled; a 1957 earthquake did the rest. Roughly 500 houses and two churches remain standing without roofs.
The oracle
sign in to retell
You smell it before you see it — wet concrete, iron, something older. Kayaköy does not announce itself. What registers first is scale — the structure is larger inside than the approach prepares you for, and colder.
The floor is a survey of everything the ceiling used to be. The known history covers perhaps two thirds of what you are standing in. Beyond that the record thins into municipal paperwork and hearsay, and then into nothing at all.
The last maintenance log is dated three weeks after the site was recorded as closed. At danger level 2 of 5, the honest advice is that the place deserves more caution than curiosity usually allows.
Site reconstruction
Walk inside Kayaköy
You arrive outside. Orbit the site, fly over it or walk the grounds, then go in — four fragments of this site's record are scattered through the structure, and your torch runs down the whole time.
ENTER THE SITE →orbit · fly · walk, then inside · sign in to keep the record
Generated from this site's record — a abandoned of its scale and condition. Its character, not its surveyed floor plan.
Field reports · 2
Written by people who actually went. Where these contradict the oracle, believe these.
Went in at first light with two others. The main hall is more intact than the photos suggest — the collapse everyone posts about is confined to the east wing. Floor is sound if you stay on the joists. We were out in ninety minutes and saw nobody.
Sign in to file a field report.
Discussion · 2
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Been on my list for six years. Every time I get close, the weather turns.
Whoever wrote this dossier has clearly been. The hazard list is exactly right.