Debunking the Tartarian Empire Conspiracy

For too long, a conspiracy theory about a supposed Tartarian Empire has been gaining traction. A theory that says a super race of giants created grand buildings, harvested free energy, then collapsed after the world was flooded with mud, leaving no records. And apparently, every government and institution on this planet has covered it up. Well, that's all plain wrong, and if you've heard this before, you've been misled. So where does this come from, and why does this conspiracy theory exist? And better yet, how can we be absolutely certain that the Tartarian Empire never existed? Hi everyone, Ken here. Hit that subscribe button, and let's uncover the truth in a special episode of This House. How did a rough young country, barely a lifetime removed from log cabins and dirt roads, produce grand buildings? It is a fair question, and it is exactly the question a certain corner of the internet is waiting to answer for you. They will lean in and tell you, in a confining tone, that you have been lied to, that no ordinary Americans built this, that the men in your history books took credit for the work of a vanished super civilization of giants, a global empire called Tartaria, whose achievements were buried, literally buried under a wave of mud that covered the whole planet a couple hundred years ago, and then scrubbed from every record on earth. It is a seductive pitch, and I understand the appeal better than most because I spend my working life inside these buildings. I research and document Gilded Age estates, I've handled the original architectural drawings, read the yellowed permits, sat with the payroll ledgers, and pored over box after box of construction phase photographs. So let me make a promise at the outset. The truth about these buildings is not a disappointment. It is more astonishing, more human, and more worth defending than any story about a theorized lost empire. Let me lay it out fairly because a strawman convinces no one. The theory holds that a vast, technologically advanced, and peaceful civilization once spanned the globe. It built the world's most beautiful architecture, the world's fair palaces, the courthouses, the cathedrals, the star-shaped forts, and the Gilded Age mansions I study, and it possessed free energy, drawn from the atmosphere through the spires, domes, and copper elements that crown its buildings. Then, sometime in the 19th century, a global mud flood swept the earth, burying the lower floors of these buildings and killing most of the population. Which is why, at hear and say, so many old buildings have windows sitting partly below the modern ground level. The survivors, or a cabal who inherited the ruins, rewrote history to hide the truth and repopulated the emptied cities. As proof, believers point to photographs of eerily empty streets, to the stylistic similarity of grand buildings worldwide, and to the conviction that our ancestors were simply too primitive to have built such things. This is the theory. It is expansive, it is emotionally resonant, and it is wrong at every load-bearing point. Let's break it down. For a theory that claims to explain all of human history, Tartaria has a short pedigree. The word Tartary is genuinely ancient, and this is where the sleight of hand begins. Open almost any European atlas printed between the 16th and 19th centuries, and you will find a huge region of interior Asia labeled Tartary or Grand Tartary. This was real, but it was never the name of a unified advanced empire. It was a European exonym, a vague catch-all that mapmakers slapped across the immense, poorly understood stretch of Central and Northern Asia. As European knowledge improved, the label dissolved into the specific names we use now – Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Central Asia. A name got more precise as ignorance receded. That is the whole mystery. The modern conspiracy grafted onto that old word has roots in Russian pseudohistory. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Moscow State University mathematician named Anatoly Fomenko began promoting what he called New Chronology, a claim that huge stretches of recorded history never happened, which real historians regard as pseudoscience. A Russian occultist named Nikolai Levashov then added a racial layer, casting a Great Tartaria as the suppressed homeland of an ancient Slavic super-race. The English version we know today, stripped of its Russian framing and refitted with mud floods and Gilded Age architecture, isn't even as old as YouTube. Researchers who have tracked its spread point to August 2016, when a YouTube creator began posting videos about a mud flood. For two years, the material drew little interest. Then, in the winter of 2018 and 2019, it exploded with a subreddit devoted to Tartaria founded that December. And from there, the theory jumped to TikTok, where individual videos have pulled in millions of views. The architecture critic Zach Mortis, writing for Bloomberg in 2021, aptly nicknamed it the QAnon of Architecture. Sit with that timeline for a moment. A theory purporting to reveal the hidden truth of all human civilization did not come from a dusty archive, a deathbed confession, or leaked government file. It came from YouTube, and caught fire on Reddit. That is not how suppressed truths behave, it is exactly how internet folklore behaves. Now we arrive at the architectural claims, where the theory feels strongest to a newcomer and collapses most completely under an expert's eye. Start with the supposed evidence that hooks almost everyone. Buildings that appear have sunk into the earth, windows peeking up from below the sidewalk, a doorway that seems to descend into the ground. Surely, the argument goes, these lower floors were buried by something. I have spent years looking at exactly these buildings, and there are two mundane, thoroughly documented explanations that between them account for essentially every example the theory offers. The first is that these spaces were designed that way on purpose. The raised basement, sometimes called the English basement, is one of the oldest tricks in the architectural book. In townhouses and mansions alike, the service world of the house, the kitchens, the laundries, the coal rooms, was placed on a lower floor that sat partly below grade. To give those spaces light and air, builders dug areaways, those sunken courtyards ringed with iron railings that still front old row houses, and set windows high in the basement walls so daylight could pour down into the light well. It was a feature drawn on the plans, priced in the bids, and built on purpose. A basement window below the sidewalk is not a drowned first floor, it is a service area with access to fresh air and sunlight. The second explanation is even more devastating to the mudflat idea, because it is the theory's own evidence turned inside out. In city after American city, the streets really were raised, sometimes dramatically, but it was not mud that raised them, it was men with jack screws. The most spectacular case is Chicago. In the 1850s, the city sat barely above the level of Lake Michigan on soggy ground with no way to drain sewage, and epidemics rolled through six years in a row, culminating in an 1854 cholera outbreak that killed 6% of the population. The engineer L.S. Chesebrough drew up a citywide sewage plan, adopted in 1856, but you cannot lay gravity stores under a city that sits at water level. So Chicago raised itself, workers laid the drains on top of the old streets, buried them under several feet of fill to create new, higher streets, and then lifted the existing buildings up to the new grade, on jack screws by hand and by the aid of horses. In 1860, a consortium of engineers that included a young George Pullman lifted half a city block on Lake Street all at once, a solid masonry row weighing an estimated 35,000 tons, using 600 men turning 6,000 jack screws, while the shops stayed open and customers came and went. Chicago is not alone. After the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which began gloriously with an overturned glue pot in a carpentry shop, Seattle rebuilt its pioneer square district and raised its streets, in places by a story or more, to solve its drainage problems. Merchants rebuilt knowing the ground floor would eventually become a basement, so they left the lower level plain and lavished their ornament on the floor above. What remained when it was all sealed up is now a tourist attraction called the Seattle Underground, an entire preserved street level one story below the modern city. Sacramento did much the same after its devastating floods. None of this was hidden, all of it sits in city records and period photographs. So here is the irony, the very phenomenon the theory points to as its smoking gun is one of the best documented triumphs of the 19th century engineering. The mud flood did not bury those buildings, they were raised by man. The next pillar is the claim that all those spires, finials, domes, and copper roofs were not decoration or utility, but antennas, a planet-spanning apparatus for harvesting free energy from the atmosphere. It is a crazy sci-fi idea, and every element it points to has a plain and documented purpose. Those pointed metal rods on ridgelines and steeples are lightning rods, proposed by Benjamin Franklin around 1750 and standard on tall and valuable buildings by the 19th century worldwide. A sharpened point connected by a conductor to the ground gives a lightning strike a safe path to earth instead of through the timbers of your roof. That is not exotic energy harvesting, it is the opposite. It is a system designed to get dangerous energy away from the building as fast as possible. The cupolas and louvered lanterns crowning old mills, courthouses, and mansions are very often ventilation. Before mechanical air conditioning, architects moved air through large buildings by design, drawing warm air up and out through roof-level openings. A ventilation cupola is a machine, but a machine for moving air, not for pulling electricity from the sky. The finials and crestings are exactly what they look like, expressions of style and status. The fluent and expensive vocabulary of the Beaux-Arts, Second Empire, Gothic Revival, and Queen Anne fashions. As for copper, it was chosen for roofs because it is durable, workable, and lasts for generations. Not to mention the beautiful patina it gains over time. And then there is Nikola Tesla, whom the theory loves to enlist as the last keeper of the lost science. Here the theory takes a true story and inverts its meaning. Tesla's dreams of wireless power transmission was absolutely real. He built a tower fort at Wardenclyffe on Long Island beginning in 1901, funded by J.P. Morgan with $150,000. And here's the part the theory cannot metabolize. It failed. Morgan declined to pour in more money. The project was abandoned around 1906, and in 1917, the tower was demolished for scrap to help settle Tesla's debts. Tesla's work is not suppressed. It is among the most celebrated bodies of work in the history of engineering, and the site of the tower is now a museum. If free atmospheric energy actually worked, the physics would still work today. Physics does not observe cover-ups. Yet in more than a century, no one, not a hobbyist, not a rival government, not a corporation with every incentive to own the patent, has ever demonstrated it. A secret that everyone would want, and no one can reproduce, is not a secret. It is an absence. Now the boldest claim of all is that these great old buildings were not built by the people credited with them, but were found, excavated, and claimed. This is the claim I am by profession equipped to answer. I own, personally, large collections of construction-based photographs of Gilded Age estates, and they are not ambiguous. They show muddy holes in the ground, where foundations are being dug. They show raw footings and rising walls, forests of wooden scaffolding, derricks swinging stone in place, and men, hundreds of them, in shirtsleeves and caps, posing on the half-finished work. You do not excavate a finished palace out of a mud-flood and end up with a photograph of its foundation trench being dug. The sequence in these images runs one way only, from hole to house. Consider Biltmore, George Vanderbilt's chateau in the mountains of North Carolina, built between 1889 and 1895, and documented obsessively by the local press and by the Vanderbilts themselves. To build it, the crews first built a small industrial world, an on-site woodworking factory, a brick kiln producing some 32,000 bricks a day, and a three-mile railroad spur to haul materials to the site. About 1,000 workers and some 60 stonemasons labored on the house, and we have the photographs of the site being leveled, of the derricks and rail lines, of the workmen commuting up the spur each morning. It is one of the best-documented construction projects in American history, and it describes, in exhaustive detail, a building being built. Now the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that gleaming white city the theory adores, proves the human story twice over. First, because we know how fast it went up. The whole spectacular ensemble was designed and built in roughly two years, under the direction of Daniel Burnham, by a workforce that swelled into the thousands. Second, because we know exactly what it was made of, and it was not eternal Tartarian stone. The grand white palaces were mostly temporary, their marble-like surfaces made of material called staff, a mixture of plaster of Paris and fiber such as jute, hung over frames of wood and steel. It was never meant to last, which is exactly why the white city did not last. After the fair, the buildings were demolished and much of the grounds burned in 1894. Only the Palace of Fine Arts survived, thanks to its brick substructure, and was later rebuilt in permanent materials as the Museum of Science and Industry. A vanished empire does not build its capital out of plaster and then let it burn. A young country throwing the greatest party in its history on a budget and a deadline absolutely does. And behind every one of these buildings stand real, documented, findable human beings. Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, who designed Biltmore and the base of the Statue of Liberty. Daniel Burnham, who ran the fair and went on to shape the plan of Chicago. Frederic Law Olmsted, who laid out the grounds of Biltmore and the fair as he had laid out Central Park. These men left offices full of drawings, and their archives sit in libraries right now, open to anyone. Columbia University holds the McKim, Mead, and White drawings, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds Burnham's papers. Beneath the famous names stand the tens of thousands whose hands did the actual work. The emigrant stonemasons, carpenters, plasterers, and ironworkers whose names survive in payroll ledgers. To say these buildings were dug out of the mud is to erase every one of them. The theory also has a special fascination with star forts, those angular fortifications shaped like snowflakes when seen from above, and insists their strange geometry must have some energetic purpose. It does have a purpose, and the purpose is defense, delivered by mathematics. Star forts were a direct response to gunpowder artillery. The tall, thin walls of a medieval castle shouted like crockery under cannon fire, as the fall of Constantinople in 1453 demonstrated to a horrified Europe. Italian engineers worked out the answer. Make the walls low, thick, and sloped so cannonballs glance off or bury themselves harmlessly in Then project angular bastions outward at the corners so defenders can sweep the base of every wall with crossfire, eliminating the dead ground where attackers could shelter. The star shape is not an antenna, it is the physical solution to a geometry problem, refined into a science by named military engineers, above all, Vauban, whose treatises survive and whose forts still stand across France. When artillery evolved again in the 19th century, the star fort became obsolete and was replaced. It is a chapter in the arms race fully explained, with the homework shown. One more visual argument deserves an answer, because it genuinely unsettles people. The old photographs of grand city streets standing eerily empty, as if the population had vanished. The answer is one of the first things you learn in history of photography. Early photographic processes needed exposure times of several minutes, during which the plates slowly gathered light. Anything that moved, a pedestrian, a trotting horse, a rolling carriage, did not stay in one spot long enough to register, and simply averaged out into nothing, leaving the street looking deserted even when it was thronged. The classic demonstration is Louis Duguerre's 1838 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, one of the busiest streets in the world, which appears empty except for one man who stood still because he was getting his boots polished. He and his boot black became, by accident, among the first human beings ever captured in a photograph, not because the street was empty, but because they alone held still. The empty streets are not to population, they are shutter speed. Here I want to step out from behind the architecture and tell you about a conversation I've had more times than I can count, because it reveals the real engine of this theory, and it is not evidence. I show a believer a construction photograph, a foundation trench being dug, workers laying the first courses of stone. The reply comes back, calm and immediate, no, that photograph shows the building being excavated, dug out of the mud. I show the architect's signed drawings, the building permit filed with the city, fabricated, planted as part of the cover-up. I show payroll ledgers with the workers' names, forged. I show newspaper coverage of the cornerstone ceremony, part of the deception. Notice what has happened. There is no possible piece of evidence I could produce that the theory cannot absorb. A photograph of a construction becomes a photograph of excavation. A document proving the building was designed becomes proof of the conspiracy that hid the truth. The counter-evidence does not weaken the theory, it feeds it. This feels to the believer like strength. It is in fact the theory's fatal weakness. A claim that cannot even in principle be disproven by any conceivable evidence is not a powerful claim. It is an empty one. If nothing could ever count against an idea, then nothing counts for it either, because confirmation only means anything when disconfirmation was genuinely possible. A theory that wins no matter what it has shown has quietly stopped being a theory about the world and become an article of faith. Scholars who study conspiracy thinking recognize the move. Absence of evidence becomes itself the evidence of suppression. Think about what actually happened in America between 1870 and 1910. A young nation, only a few generations removed from wilderness, a country of farmers and freshly arrived immigrants who often could not yet speak the same language, taught itself to build at the level of Paris and Rome. Not over centuries, within two generations. The 1893 fair that so amazed the world was conceived, designed, and constructed in about two years. Immigrant craftsmen carved the stone and modeled the plaster and forged the iron that made these buildings sing. American engineers looked at a city drowning in its own swamp and jacked it up out of the mud on hand-crank screws while the shop stayed open. That is a more remarkable thing than any mud flood. A flood is something that happens to people. Raising Chicago is something people did. And the electricity theory fantasizes about a lost secret? It was not lost. It was switched on in plain sight. Tesla and Westinghouse and Edison electrified the world in front of everyone, and the 1893 fair itself blazed with electric light before millions who had never seen such a thing. The wonder was real. It just belonged to name-human beings who worked for it. This is why I find the Tartaria theory not merely wrong, but sad, even a little insulting. It presents itself as a way of honoring these magnificent buildings. It does the exact opposite. It steals the credit. It takes the achievement away from the 1,000 workers at Biltmore, the 600 men turning jack screws on Lake Street, the immigrant stonemasons whose names sit in the payroll ledgers and hands it to a phantom empire that left no bodies, no tools, no workshops, no field drafts, nothing at all except supposedly the finished buildings themselves. The people who actually built these places are exactly who the theory writes out of the story. Go find the photographs, read the permits, walk the buildings. The record is still there, and it has always told the truth. All we have ever had to do is refuse to let it be buried, period in a mudflat of conspiracy theories that is. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Let me know your thoughts down below in the comment section, and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.