5 Largest Abandoned Cities in the World
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- čas přidán 16. 06. 2024
- They may be the largest ghost towns, but even ghosts won't live there.
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I'll be honest the loss of that bread museum makes me sad. I love bread! I love museums! Together they are a mighty super power!
Its a bread and butter money making opportunity
Lol okay
Some people don’t like carbs & they make rest of us suffer
@Arna Cook I feel the sesame
Sorry but that museum is toast ! Lol 🍞
2:00 - Chapter 1 - Agdam
5:05 - Chapter 2 - Pripyat
8:05 - Chapter 3 - Petra
11:05 - Chapter 4 - Pompeik
14:15 - Chapter 5 - Hashima Island
Thanks mate
Both Petra and Pompeii is titled as Chapter Four in the video. :]
Pompeii is such a scary sight to see those castings of the dead, seeing their final positions in agony, protecting those they loved, but unable to do so, so sad and so tragic... :(
I agree. Documentaries on Pompeii scared me so, so much more than any movie when I was a little kid. I felt so helpless and heartbroken for those families 😞
Yeah, I remember seeing one of these in a museum as a kid, certainly stuck with me.
I enjoyed my Pompeii and Herculaneum trip. We didn’t realize most of Herculaneum was “buried” by the current town of Herculaneum. Yes, the bodies were…uncomfy, but the rest was pure fascination. I was stationed in Naples in the mid 90s and wish wish wish I would’ve had more time to revisit. It’s on my bucket list a time or five.
If you’re interested in this history I recommend the Elodie Harper trilogy - wolf den, house with the blue door and temple of fortune - it’s about Pompeii and the last book has a harrowing chapter on the Vesuvius explosion.
It and Herculaneum are just eerie, amazing places to see. I’m glad they stopped doing the casts though, as it ruined the opportunity to study the bodies and learn about their lives. Fortunately there are enough- between both places- that we can get an incredible insight into how they lived, what they did for work etc. there are even sewer systems where we can study their diets- which aren’t much different to today’s residents!!
You should make a video about the abandoned underground cities in central Turkey, most of them are in Cappadocia region and date back around two thousand years. The largest are up to eight levels deep and could have housed thousands of people.
I've seen some videos with references to the place you're talking about and would love to see Whistler's take (research and opinion) about this place.
I always find it impressive when Simon talks about subjects he hates, dislikes or has absolutely no interest in and manages to make himself sound genuine, like talking about the Football club in number one.
🤔
He should do more star wars and lord of the rings videos
I don't care about soccer either, but I still find it somewhat interesting that there's a major team for a city with a population of 0.
It's a skill
You’re right. Shame on him for being more intelligent and educated than everyone on TikTok and onlyfans.
The Library of Alexandria, and the Chernobyl disaster are two disasters that I wish never happened in this universe...
Great Episode. Needs a part 2 with there being more abandoned places with cool histories around them; Nicossia/Kokkina in Cyprus, Tikal (or any other Mayan city) in Mexico, and Bayou Corne in Louisiana.
Centralia, PA... the city burning from below.
He probably would if anyone cared about them enough, as in one of his writers did.
The cliff cities of the Pueblo people!
@@elphabanope3571 its not Nicosia that is abandoned in Cyprus. it is Famagusta that is the abandoned ghost city. I can see it from my house.
@@griddlemarks6116 did you mean to reply to someone else? I said nothing about any city in Cyprus.
you forgot to mention the dude in Pompeii that was cranking one out when he died
Went out on a high note.
There's a number of decent documentaries on Centralia. There's still a couple people who still live there. They said because of the high grade coal and how much of it was under the town it's going to burn for at least the next 200 years.
The firefighters and town ran out of money to put it out right before they could get it out. Ultimately the government decided it would be cheaper to buy everyone's property and abandon (I think it was about 25 million to do that at the time) opposed to spending 200 million trying to put out the fire and save the town. Crazy stuff.
That seems very American, no offence.
Every time they made an effort to put it out, it was not quite enough. A small part kept burning and went on to burn.
Every time they made an effort to put it out, it was not quite enough. A small part kept burning and went on to burn.
@@patsysadowski1546 no, it really does, and I'm American. 😂
Everything costs money. You might want to put solar panels on every roof, but the money to get the job done comes from somewhere. Someone has to pay the installers, the factory workers, the guys who dug up the raw materials from the earth. There is a fire under Centralia, without a doubt. A big one even. But at the end of the day, if you live in a house that is 4,000,000 square feet, and even if you put it out (twice) you can't seem to make the fire actually stop, then you find out that the foundation of the house itself is flammable and nothing that you do will ever end the fire, do you try to invent a way to kill fire or do you just cut your losses and leave? Hopefully, this helps you understand that this isn't an "American" idea, this is just common fucking sense.
I live about 2 hours from Centralia, and have been through the town a few times over the years. It is certainly strange. They had to rebuild roads to avoid the main coal seems to prevent cave-ins and make it harder to get into town. I know a few still live in town, but otherwise it is completely abandoned.
I know that you can't move back. The land is all essentially forfeit but those who couldn't or simply refused to move are allowed to stay but the property is useless otherwise.
I live roughly half an hour from Centralia and when i did road service calls for a previous company, i would constantly drive through. It is a neat little town, but definitely eerily empty
Fascinating - though I'm a teeeeeny bit sad you didn't give some links or at least a brief mention on the fact that you've covered several of these places in depth on other channels. The video on Petra was SO good, as was the look you took at Hashima...
Great video and script, once again!
Really!
Simon, you should link to your other vids and in no time you'lln have a missive interconnected network/wiki! I guarantee that will push views up even more!
I know I know... it's just (a) I often don't remember where I made the video, and (b) finding and linking everything is kinda a pain in the ass ;)
@@Sideprojects Sounds like your in need of an assistant.
Petra, Centralia, he has to have done Chernobyl…. Probs Pompeii
You might say the bread museum was toasted.
Booo
That joke is a bit stale…
Simon, very happy to have found your channel...love how you focus on the weird, forgotten, or obscure but fascinating. Quality stuff, brother.
If I had a Simon Whistler wish list for possible subjects it would be:
"Mind-Destroying Revelations from Underwater Deepsea Drones."
I swear I would listen to Simon read the assembly instructions for ikea furniture
Interesting, I wonder how Assyrian cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Asur would list out? And let's not forget Angkor Wat, the cities of Maya and the cities devastated by Genghis Khan and the Mongols.
Most ancient dead cities seem to only hold a few ten thousand people. Any city that had a larger population in ancient history (currently known of) are currently populated.
Most of these ancient civilizations we're reliant on relatively small resources for such a large population.
@@Vlad2319 Angkor Wat was home to between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its height during the 13th century, and was only slightly smaller than Ancient Rome at the height of the Empire. Pompeii in contrast held only 12,000 people at the time of the eruption, and people quickly resettled the area, even if not occupying the original buildings.
@@ladygrndr9424 if I remember correctly parts of Angkor wat were inhavited until recently
50,000 people use to live in Pripyat. Now it's a ghost town. Never seen anything like it.
You might want to include Bonanza, Colorado, in the United States. Founded in 1881, it grew rapidly from discoveries of gold and silver, to a peak population of around 30,000. There were even smaller "suburbs" that sprang up around other mines! It was served by a railroad, and even had a visit from US President Grover Cleveland. There were numerous saloons, hotels, shops and such as well as a city government and schools - but oddly, never a church. When the mines shut down, the population moved away, and is currently listed as somewhere between 1 and 17 - depending on time of year. It's still an actual town, with a few buildings still standing, as well as some of the structures from the mines.
It does have this little problem of such waste products from mining in the late 19th-early 20th centuries including arsenic and cyanide. Other than that, it's a lovely area.
If people still live there, it isn't abandoned. Hence why it isn't featured in this video. Perhaps if Simon makes a video called "towns with around 17 inhabitants", it'll be included.
@@ScotsmanDougal How about "Towns with a population of 2 and below."? There are several such towns that I can think of, and they operate in interesting ways. For instance, Manowi, NE has a single inhabitant, who is mayor, city clerk, librarian, village board, water operator - and who issued herself a bar license. The bar serves the people who live on farms & ranches outside of town.
I can't get over that thieves went to Pripyat after a nuclear meltdown? How desperate were people to make a quick buck that they'd go to potentially get radiation poisoning?
Well, this was the USSR, probably more to do with feeding themselves and families rather than just easy money.
*Putin enters the chat.
A lot of people don't understand the dangers of radiation. Since it is invisible, there is no obvious threat.
There have been several incidents where people tampered with radioactive equipment, even enjoying the heat a nuclear source was giving off, because they didn't know what they were toying with.
Lots of incidents like these are covered on the Plainly Difficult CZcams channel.
Love all your channels….I work 12 hr shifts at night and I learn something new everynight. Thanks for the videos. Btw are you just the face and voice or do you do the research and editing?
When plaster molds and artifacts from Pompeii were brought to a city nearby, I went to the exhibit. I couldn't pass it up. Amazing stuff. Treat yourself to things like that when you can. It's really an experience!
I love unique experiences like that. I did 100’s of similar things growing up and my husbands family never did. He grew up in dysfunctional poverty and I grew up lower middle class but had a stable and functional household.
I know you did an episode on that, but as a bonus in the end, talking about the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane would be a plus.
The village has been purposely left as it was when the Nazis killed nearly all inhabitants. Today Oradour was rebuilt, but next to the old village. The old one is a memorial for all people that were butchered that day.
simon really does have a near perfect speaking voice, IDK i imagine him in a pub with friends, discussing his writings, like a 21st century JRR tolkein
Great vid, Simon.
I guess it's too much to hope for that the Bread Museum would have been dedicated to that soft-rock '60s-'70s band. Oh, well. In the end, it don't matter to me.
Many of my acquaintances think Petra is what actually is just the treasury of Petra. I blame that Indiana Jones movie for this.
It was in late April of 1986, when I was 19, that a faculty member from the physics department of the University of North Texas (back then North Texas State University) and I met in a common area on campus. He had a time piece and a Geiger counter....
I knew the fellow, I was a student and his son was dating my sister.... and so he allowed me to take part in observing when the radiation from across the globe would get there... I think he and some colleagues had a wager. I don't remember too many details but he was about 3 seconds off too early.
What about a video on the race for recovering rare earth metals (for use in battery production and the move to a green energy) vs the enviromental impact on the mining.
From Vegas, we would visit Ghost Towns(mining towns). Extremely dangerous open pit mines are everywhere.
Bring a metal detector and you'll have fun!
Driving from vegas to mammoth mt. Was such a wasteland! The few towns/small cities were so isolated. Just from the road you could see so much abandoned equipment
@@benjaminrees6665 You have to drive between the hills to get to REAL ghost towns. Not a tourist attraction, kinda scary, but very cool. Bring water, a sandwich, a camera, a metal detector, and a gun.
@@michaelpipkin9942 yeah I understand all of that
Fascinating. Thank you.
Petra is incredible! One of my favorite places ive ever visited! Its sad though, the tourists are making it erode/disintigrate quickly. The royal family is trying to save it though
The guy who revealed it is scum.
Herculaneum is well worth adding to this list as Herculaneum has more and better preserved artifacts than does Pompeii.
I just knew Pripyat was going to be one of these five places, going into this video. That place has been forever immortalized by a nation (the Soviet Union) that no longer exists. It is truly a relic of darker times.
Darker than what? When? Now? Damn, things have rarely been darker thsn theyvare today. Climate change is something capitalism hasn't the capacity to address, and so we descend again into fascism
@@willywonka7812 If you think today is dark, then you clearly are lucky to have not lived through what came before. That is all I'm going to say about that.
@@jacob4920 yeah bro, i totally have no idea about history. I've never read about the bronze bull, or aztec sacrifices, or Augusto Pinochet dropping students from helicopters.
What you're doing is dangerously ignorant, when you imply that existential threats and institutionalised violence are a thing if the pest
@@willywonka7812 Exactly where did I accuse you of having "no idea" about history. All I said was you are lucky to have not lived through it. There is a difference. Because the world we have today is the best humanity has ever been.
And look, I get it. We're nowhere NEAR perfection. But through the lens of history, the world has never been better. You don't like it, then hurry up and change it yourself. Otherwise, you're just a complainer on the internet.
@@jacob4920 wjat I'm doing is praxis. Disabusing fools like you of your foolish views, as though mass ignorance has been lessened by the information age, rather than rendering the proletariat willing serfs to technocrats controlling their speech and thoughts
Kinda weird to think that wax tablets could have survived Pompeii. Given everything, they must've been in the perfect places.
Honestly the bread museum sounds amazing so sad it’s gone : (
Worked with a guy that was part of the initial cleanup crew for Chernobyl, he never talked about it much outside of the safety briefing we did for drills (nanotech research company, not dangerous but did have some stuff that would be a building clearer).
This was a really good one, Simon you LEGEND!! Thank you.
I’ve been to Petra as a kid and Pompeii as well…both are amazing. Idk if it’s ethical to visit them now, but if so I recommend
16:35 It would have been nicer if you'd mentioned that the Japanese government has so far failed to implement the promises they'd made to China and Korea. The UNESCO agreed in 2018 that it was problematic how the Japanese government handled this whole situation, so they set up an independent committee to look into the matter. To no one's surprise, the committee found out that Japan's efforts to remember the victims were unsatisfactory. The UNESCO asked the Japanese government to honor their promises, but as I mentioned above, the Japanese government is still being very reluctant to deliver on those promises.
Yea Japan doesn't like to talk about their part in WW2 or teach it most Japanese school kids have 2 pages of WW2 in a history book, cuz the governments of Japan said it was anti Japanese to teach the truth lol so basically all people in Japan know is we were Minding our own business then got Nuked by the allies
Simon did a video on how the Japanese teach WW2. And surprising they don't... Basically the US just nuked 2 city for no reason.
invasion of Iraq was
Unfortunately, there were NO chemical weapons.
MORE innocents died in Iraq than in Nagasaki.
As an introvert with autism and adhd, these places seem like a real version of heaven
"... it was initially situated..." Pretty sure it hasn't moved since.
Always interesting, informative and entertaining 👍 team 👍
Any chance you'd consider a video on the remains of the trenches of world war I?
Awesome!
This is the best vidoe I watched today! subbed and liked ! you are wonderful. a fellow creator
FINALLY someone that doesn't just say that it was a nuclear explosion, but gives the actual cause.
Actually Pripyat has people living there now, many moved back into their old residences.
Good video 👍
Good name👍
Love your work and the evolving back drop. That dark doorway to your living room could be used for spooky brain imagery / "fake" nasa telescope photoshops and the like...
My wife's cousins lived there when Chernobyl happened. Her cousin was pregnant at the time. Their daughter was born deformed. 😢
A friend of mine in Cleveland and his family adopted a family displaced by Chernobyl. They go to visit them every year.
One of the most interesting episodes!
USSR: there were no accident there
Putins Russia: its not a war
I think Agdam is the city I saw in the distance when driving around Artsakh in a taxi. It looked SO big, and yet, all rubble. Blew my mind.
I'm addicted to these channels and stories
I think my uncle was a POW in Hashima during WW2. He was there when the bomb went off in Nagasaki. My cousin and her kids have some health issues as a result because of the radiation my uncle was exposed to as a teenager. It's closer to Nagasaki than people realize.
Yasssssssss... Centralia. I'm from Pa and have been to Centralia 4 times. Going there at night time is straight up reminiscinet of Silent Hill
god i love these. thanks
Hashima Island remains a sore point. Yes, South Korea and China withdrew their opposition once Japan had agreed to their conditions. However, once the UNESCO World Heritage status was given, subsequent Japanese politicians dithered on adhering to the conditions, and till this day it is a point of aggrievement.
Classic Japanese government to sweep their shitty behaviour under the carpet. I know all countries do it to some degree but the Japanese government seem particularly inclined that way.
Eeh. In China's case it's laughable hypocrisy, given the tens of millions of their own people murdered / starved by their own government, and how badly they treat the populace today as well. As always the PRC is grievance mining, a practice not uncommon to S-Korea either (N-Korea's deranged ramblings are generally ignored, as the other two should be).
Good episode.
There is a fantastic new documentary re: Pompeii on Curiosity Stream. It covers the first new dig there in decades, in 2019 just before the pandemic locked things down. An area needed to be excavated to prevent further water damage to the site and so there's a brand new area opened. It shows road repairs from the earthquakes that happened during the previous decade still ongoing. Sad, but absolutely fascinating.
1:12 when you copy and paste the same house all over in Minecraft
Petra is still active for tourists. I would love to visit and see the amazing carvings in the rocks there.....I learned this on a similar channel. No relation I'm sure.
Two others worth a look:
Varosha, Cyprus
Windhoek, Namibia.
I'd like to see a flowchart connecting all of Simon's videos.
what about Angkor? Maybe up to a million people lived there until it fell.
This town (toooown) is coming like a ghost town.
All the clubs are being closed down.
I've been to two of these places; Petra and Pompeii. Coincidentally both were during my return trip from the middle east when my ship was sent there.
Wow......I hadn't even considered that a bread museum might exist. Surely the mold museum can't be far behind.
Hashima Island is also one of the major settings in the book "The Rising Seas" by Clive Cussler. In fact, it’s where the book's climax took place!
Do one on the Mount Athos religious complex in Greece! They don't allow women anywhere inside the territory.
It's weird that of all of the things you could say about Mount Athos, you chose "they don't allow women."
There are a million things to say about Mt Athos, the scenery, the history, the mythology, the plant and animal life, literally you could've said anything, yet you chose that, that they don't allow women.
Interesting.
Purely saying this with no bias and ignorance to the politics...
3:44 - that is beautiful and well-kept
While these cliff dwellings don't really count as cities, the ruins at Mesa Verde in Colorado are well worth seeing . They weren't destroyed by any natural disaster or wars, but abandoned by the Anasazi , probably because of drought. If you're ever in the 4 corners area, check 'em out.
I've long wondered whether the consistent heat in Centralia could be used to generate electricity.
You know... the funny part is, when humans left it was for the better. Nature took over and made place nice again (well some of them anyways).
I just see Simon's face and click without even looking at the channel. I really thought this one was on GeoGraphics before the SideProjects theme.
There's a healthy amount added in the last 60 yrs. The Salton Sea, or Gary, Indiana, Raqqa, Khan Younis, the city near Fukushima that have an extremely tiny amount of people left.
If you count things that were never really inhabited in the first place and aren't technically an independent city but more of a "development area" off to one side of an existing city, then the entire list would be dominated by China's real-estate investment "housing" complexes. But I think those should be excluded, because "abandoned" doesn't really apply to things that weren't even built mainly for the purpose of being inhabited in the first place, but rather to be sold as investments.
Nineveh seems like it ought to be on the list, if nothing else because in its day it may possibly have been the largest city in the world.
That sounds like a great idea for a list! Have a lovely day.
I've seen some of those cities, and it's wild. Cities that look like they should hold a million people, highways with five lanes in each direction, but completely void of life. The only people who live there are the people who own the buildings. It's so chilling. But I wouldn't say they were abandoned, because in order to have been abandoned, they had to have been lived in first.
Awesome
The reason why most of these places are abandoned are heartbreaking.
Unlikely that a pyroclastic flow reached 2500°C.
30 degrees Celsius is only 84.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Kinda warm for physical labor, but certainly not THAT bad
Brits r weak to heat
I'm amazed that you didn't include Kayaköy
Pretty sure that there are also squatter communities in the exclusion zone too.
God love em, but hell no.
Centralia isn't entirely abandoned. There's about 4 or 5 residents and a post office for them. They were permitted to continue living there with the stipulation that when they die their property will be transferred to state ownership. As in they can't will it to their family or sell it.
still finding more channels with you simon
1:30 Correction:
Alexandria still remains very much unsubmerged. The sunken city close to Alexandria is called Heracleion.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleion
It was a very large and important port city, but became lost and mostly forgotten for most of history since its Veniciation (not a real word, no). It was found relatively recently and is probably one of the absolute coolest places to go scuba diving. I don’t know if you’re allowed though, I have no experience with it.
Heard about Pripyat from the lady who actually was on the lead of getting people out of there. She gave an interview to Yes Theory CZcams channel on the video they made about Ukraine.
I think the exact date of Mount Vesuvius was August 23 73AD. 🤓
Some 1897 years later, came River Phoenix, whose life was cut tragically short...
Aged 23! 😱
A little piece of trivia regarding the city of Petra. That carved structure most used in identifying Petra has always been a front. The doorway leads to a very small chamber within, but that's it. It's a dead-end. Though it is a magnificent site, it never was a real structure. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade took quite a few liberties with that carving.
I'm surprised Bralorne, B.C. Canada didn't make this list. Witha population of in excess of 250,000 at the turn of the century. It was one of the largest cities in North America at the time and was found marked on global maps. Currently the population is less than 400.
You've peaked my interest. I'll look it up now, wondering why it got left behind.
All of British Columbia only had ~180,000 people at the time.
@@lizc6393 piqued
@@willywonka7812 haha, oh Jesus I knew that once upon a time. Guess the alcoholism is taking a toll on my memory.
How is this dude on every youtube channel?
There is no CZcams anymore; it's SimonTube now.
50000 people used to live here now it's a ghost town.
30 degrees and 95% humidity is a normal day in Australia
simon, can you level your into and outro like 50% its soo loud!!
30 degrees Celsius and 95% Humidity? - that's like every summer day in St Louis.
There’s about 1,000 people living on the outskirts of Chernobyl today, not only wildlife. The way they live though is like the late 1800s early 1900s
Interesting subject, but you forgot Lepta Magnis in Lybia.
That's cool you know all that about Petra I thought I was the only that liked subjects that have been dead for 2,000 years
15:07 so a really cold summer in Cairns, FNQ?
Once I got lost... Not unusual, but anyway, I was lost and driving around and I saw a sign that said town name, I can't remember the town name, population 1. I'm not kidding and there stood a rail road track, a grain silo thing, and one old looking home with no ppl. I was like omfg... I am afraid... So I called my mom, this was before GPS, and I asked her to map quest or something for me to get out of this situation... Unfortunately because the town didn't show on a map and I had no idea where I was that didn't work. So... My mom asked me where the sun was cause it was setting. I told her and she is like OK that's west... 😂 And by the grace of the sun and a phone call to my mom that I am even suprised went through in a town of 1 back then with my mom hundreds of miles away from me... 😂 I was able to navigate back to my apartment in the city and I survived the scarey town of 1. Hurray!
Bode Ca is not a place to take lightly. You should do a video about the curse on that ghost town. 0:29