Exploring Many Ancient Megalithic Sites Across Turkey Including Enigmatic Gobekli Tepe

Hi, this is Brian Forster and this is Istanbul in Turkey. Its older name of course was Constantinople and this is what's called the Grand Bazaar. It's where you can buy basically anything and I've heard that up to 200,000 people visit this site each and every day. You have to go through a metal detector as you can tell. So here we are in the Grand Bazaar. Now what does this have to do with megalithic sites? Well that will be later on in the video. I just wanted to give you a sense and feel of what Istanbul is like. We were there in September 2019 for about 12 days and then trying to get out of the Grand Bazaar was a bit of a challenge but made it. After that looking at the cobs of corn there we were at the Bosporus which is the seawater area that is in between or connects the European side of Istanbul with the Asian side and as you can see there's incredible boat traffic that goes on as well as ground transportation. Then on our way to the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque we passed by this obelisk which is from Karnak in Egypt and then it was on to the Blue Mosque which happened to be closed that day but we did go into the Hagia Sophia and as you can see Turkey is world famous for its incredible inlays and mosaics and then this is outside of the Hagia Sophia. Curiously on the outside we found a number of these giant gray granite columns and they were so smooth that they appear to have been turned on ancient lathes much as like we find at Baalbek in Lebanon and then also the presence of this purple stone which is called Imperial Porphyry and it's only found in the eastern desert of Egypt. Incredibly smooth surface. So here you see the hole at one end where the ancient lathe would have attached to this rather massive column. One piece approximately 20 feet or 6 meters long. There were a number of them and now we are inside the Hagia Sophia. At the time when it was built it was supposedly the largest church in the world and then it became a mosque and more recently it has become a museum and this is the central dome you can see all of the inlaid fresco mosaic patterns some of it from the Christian period some of it from the Islamic period and also the presence of more of these huge one-piece pillars that are very curious because during the Greco-Roman time period most of the pillars were made of many pieces of stone not single ones so it's my theory that these were actually brought from ancient Egypt and are pre-dynastic that they were made utilizing forms of lost ancient high technology the same as the construction of the pyramid system as well as the serapion boxes in the underground tunnels of Saqqara. You can see the strange scarring of the surfaces there and now we're going to go to the second level in order to be able to look down into the main interior part of the Hagia Sophia. So up and up we go you can see relatively crude construction techniques but relatively typical of the Roman Greek and later time periods and now we're going to be going inside once again beautiful inlay in the ceilings unfortunately quite a bit of it seems to be peeling off why they are not doing repairs I don't understand the scaffolding is not there to fix the mosaics but I think the basic interior construction of the structure. After that we went underground and this is called the Basilica Cistern if you want to read the whole thing please pause the video but it's a massive underground system I believe made during Roman times and could hold an incredible amount of fresh water for utilization in ancient Constantinople. So this is us walking through the labyrinth system of the cistern and one thing that caught my eye was what's called the crying column again hit pause if you want to read the whole thing it's the only column inside that has this very interesting all-seeing eye looking shapes carved into the single piece of column took us about an hour to walk through there then it was to the Istanbul National Archaeology Museum where supposedly they have a million artifacts which is quite incredible quite a lot of work from the Hittite time period as you can see here and then these large I believe limestone or marble sarcophagi from the Greek time period but what was most curious are these giant containers which supposedly were used as sarcophagi this is the stone is called imperial porphyry and is seven out of ten in terms of hardness and again is only found as far as I can tell in the eastern desert of Egypt so I don't believe that these were quarried by the Greeks or the Romans I think they actually found these in ancient Egypt and then later did the embellishing and detail carving of the exterior also curious are these char marks that you can see where the lid and the box intersect as if there was an internal explosion in them which is exactly what we see in places like the Valley of the Kings in Egypt where there are large granite boxes that show the same effect what kind of internal explosion we're still trying to figure that out but these were from a megalithic standpoint the most fascinating aspect of visiting Istanbul on this particular day. Hi this is Brian Forster and today we're exploring a site in Turkey called San Simeon which was a monastery and place of religious practice and pilgrimage from about 550 AD into the 1200s now unfortunately there are lots of these giant turbines located in the same location but what we're going to see is that this was clearly originally a megalithic site and then likely there was a series of cataclysms that struck it like at other locations that we find in Egypt and Peru for example and then it was repaired during the Christian time period so on the back wall you can see the repair work that is on the top and in the center of the wall the rest of it most of it at least is the limestone bedrock itself so the site was originally sculpted from the bedrock and it's highly unlikely that this was done during the time period of 550 AD and onwards again look at the blocks on the left hand side on the top and the fact that this was sculpted out of the bedrock so this is what again we see at lots of other ancient sites in important megalithic locations such as Peru and Bolivia and Egypt but also here in Turkey there is the central pillar where San Simeon supposedly spent the latter 40 years of his life preaching with the chester there to show a sense of scale that again is the sculpted bedrock and in behind you see obviously that the walls have been damaged and repaired and damaged again and here again if you look at the upper part of the wall in the background you can see clearly that it has been repaired so this is a short video part of the series that I did from our recent tour of Turkey in September of 2019 and the main function of it of it is simply once again to show you the difference between the repair work that you can see and the older megalithic work this again clearly you see on the top where repairs have been made as compared to the massiveness of the megalithic bedrock work and actually I'd never heard of this site before it just happened to be on our itinerary when we went we were all pleasantly surprised to find another megalithic site in Turkey and stay tuned for an upcoming video or series of them about other locations that we visited in Turkey such as megalithic Hattusa and you'll see lots of evidence of lost ancient high technology machine tool work. Hi, this is Brian Forster and we're very close to the Mediterranean in Turkey and what we're looking at look at the wall on the left this is the beginning of what's called Titus's Tunnel supposedly created first started by Vespasian in 70 AD continued by Titus Roman Emperor in 80 AD and completed by Antonius Pius in 161 AD. Now this I believe what you just saw on the right is Roman work but there's no way that I believe that this huge opening in the bedrock was done solely with hand tools it's just too big a work again look at the left hand side and look at the right hand side you can see that the bedrock which is limestone but it's also metamorphose limestone almost perfectly flat surfaces vertical surfaces and as we continue on continue looking at the left again very flat and we haven't even reached Titus's Tunnel yet so as we continue along again you can see the flat surfaces in the bedrock and here this shows you the depth of how big it is and how much work would have been required. I think this is definitely a candidate for lost ancient high technology and was found and then fine-tuned by the Romans. I don't think the Romans did this out of the bedrock and were able to just here this could be a natural surface and there in the background you can see that the giant wall continues there on the left hand side you saw some shaping there the limestone this is a classic Roman arch so of course this would have been the work of the Romans not particularly super fine workmanship but then again the big wall continues on the left side and now on both sides now this is the beginning of the actual Titus's Tunnel and is almost a mile long through the bedrock the ceiling a minimum of 20 feet tall the Romans of course did have steel chisels and other hand tools but I think this is way too big of a construction project to have been done solely by hand during Roman times and again we continue along you can see a water channel that has recently been repaired on the right hand side that was also probably a Roman work so either this initially was something created by water erosion over the course of millions of years or it's a very good example of lost ancient high technology that was then fine-tuned during the Roman time period as we walk out once again look at the flatness of the wall hi this is Brian Forster and look very carefully at the wall in the background you see holes cut into the bedrock now we're in Cappadocia which is in central Anatolia in Turkey and I was simply blown away by the number of these chambers carved into the bedrock the material is actually quite soft most of it is volcanic ash and so it's not a question of using high technology to cut these chambers but it's the sheer volume of them not simply in this location but in many locations we drove for hours and hours and kept encountering absolutely astonishing now in most accounts it's believed that this was done by early Christians who were fleeing persecution in other countries and so they most of them came to Turkey in order to escape being persecuted but I get the gut feeling that these are thousands of years older than we've been taught and that the Christians simply utilized them because they were already there there are also a number of these that were turned into churches such as this one called the Yilanli church and we're actually going to go inside once again the stone workmanship is relatively crude and the material is quite soft but they're actually they're absolutely beautiful in terms of the paintings and frescoes left behind by the early Christians and this is a little side valley that we walked through for about an hour and it was mainly on the western side which is the right side that we find these churches and other chambers cut into this soft bedrock again not the difficulty of making them simply the sheer volume of them was quite incredible in some cases there are multiple stories I'm about to upload soon a video about one of the underground cities that we went in in the Cappadocia area so stay tuned for that so here we are again in another one of the churches with the paintings on the ceiling of biblical scenes and here it looks like some of them are still being utilized having wooden doors put in them possibly for storage so now we've moved to another location this is one of the major ancient centers where we find these chambers and again as we go inside relatively deep into the bedrock you can see the tool marks they don't look like the use of high technology they look simply like hand chisels to me but again the material is very soft and then here we're going into another one different niches used for different purposes and even a second story in this one see the darkening of the walls and the ceiling from centuries of fires being lit probably cooking fires inside and here another one again you can see the rough tool marks and also the darkening of the ceiling this being one of the major centers and one of the major tourist centers of course there were way too many people but we simply had to deal with that on this day some of the other locations had far fewer visitors there's a very long table cut into the bedrock and then another church this is called the dark church why it's called that I don't know and I actually didn't really go inside because there were far too many people in single file going in and then trying to come back out the single entrance exit and then another location if you look very carefully once again you can see the chambers in the background and then this entire small mountain is riddled with these chambers again the idea that they were solely made by christians fleeing persecution early in christendom is highly unlikely but they were obviously occupied by the christians and other people turkey has thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years of human habitation so who knows how old these actually are hi this is brian forster and this is uh exploration in the area of cappadocia in turkey we're going to visit derinkuyu which is the largest underground city in turkey now this is one of the most enigmatic and strange places i've ever visited because supposedly it was constructed by the phrygian people in the 7th or 8th century bc it's 200 feet deep at least and supposedly could house 20 000 people as well as livestock etc this is one of the large shafts that goes down from the surface for air ventilation but my honest belief is that this had to have been either a natural underground series of shafts and tunnels or was done in the very very distant past with some form of lost ancient high technology and then was discovered by the phrygian people because again it's 200 feet deep and for most of the extent that we went through we were allowed down 10 stories supposedly it goes down 20 stories and without artificial lighting it would be almost completely pitch black in here the idea that they would have torches is highly unlikely as well because the ventilation is there but it's not extensive so you would have all sorts of soot building up on the ceilings and people would be choking without being able to breathe properly there are supposedly hundreds of other underground cities in turkey as well but this one is the largest and deepest most of the other underground cities so-called are one to two stories whereas this again we were told is about 20 stories or 200 feet but who knows since we were only allowed access to the top 10 levels it might go deeper and there are also government records that the cities connect with one another so they're separated in some cases by several miles or kilometers so how would somebody with hand tools possibly be able to a carve down 200 feet into the ground and then connect one city with the next just doesn't to me make any sense now the stone involved is a relatively soft probably compressed volcanic ash but it wasn't soft enough for me to be able to scratch with a key or knife so again it's harder than what they state in terms of the standard story of the place and you can see how narrow the passageway is so how would 20,000 people be able to move back and forth except in a large chamber like this up and down the staircase the other intriguing thing is that the stairs there were put in in the 1960s so before that it was simply a series of ramps going down underground and so how easy to get down into but how would you get back out again unless you had a number of ropes so on the left side not gonna be able to see well actually you do see there they're actually that's where there's another natural air shaft that comes down for ventilation but in general almost all of the area would be pitch black if not for the series of artificial lights that were installed the other odd thing is that it was lost to history up until the 1960s when a man was supposedly doing some work or excavations in the lower part of his house and then he broke through and exposed the existence of this for the first time in possibly thousands of years so again you see how narrow the pathway is how to get 20,000 people moving back and forth through this it's just it's a very very strange place very very fascinating and you would think that the entrance would be in the side of a hill or a mountain but as you saw in the beginning of the video it starts on simply on the surface and goes down into deep into the ground so these are the stairs that were installed in the 1960s they're concrete before that there would have been ramps so now we're coming back up having gone into the ground approximately 100 feet but it was hard to judge because the the levels are very uneven it's not like you go down 10 feet and then walk horizontally and then go down 10 feet some of the staircases were probably 20 or even 30 feet and then you'd have horizontal areas to walk through so this is one of the last staircases going back up again if you are in Turkey I would definitely recommend visiting Derinkuyu very mysterious and the entire Cappadocia area is just full of ancient mysterious locations almost all of them cut into the bedrock and finally this is the last level you can see some mortar and stone put together and this is coming up through the exit hi this is Brian Forrester and today we're exploring Hattusa in Turkey the most famous aspect of this ancient Hittite site are these two lion figures but we're going to see evidence of two different levels of construction one rough as you can see on the right there and this which is megalithic tight-fitting stones or at least they once were this wall section was obviously victim to a massive earthquake that pulled it apart but you can see other parts are tight fitting relatively originally there would have been no mortar whatsoever here you can see that it's tight fitting in this area and there you see where it's been pulled apart by an ancient and massive cataclysm likely an earthquake now on the right side we see tight-fitting work and there in the background very rough so clearly two different stages of construction by two different cultures here again we go from rough on the right to megalithic tight-fitting larger stones on the left also evidence of ancient drill holes not just these four but we saw between 50 and 100 ancient core drills and by looking in detail you see lots of weathering inside so these are in no way modern after that it was up a relatively crude staircase made during the Hittite period and into a massive tunnel now this tunnel is composed of large megalithic blocks but they're not particularly tight-fitting and so it's very likely that this again is from the Hittite period and not from the older more high-tech megalithic period you can see that the wall that the tunnel is quite long and what's going to be curious is what we see at the end it's here once again a drill hole for a hinge and on the other side we can also see that the doors would open inward inside the tunnel and when we go outside once again a crude retaining wall constructed during the Hittite period this is quite like what we see in Peru Bolivia and Egypt we see the work of the cultures we know of such as the dynastic Egyptians and the Inca but then we also see much more high-tech work such as here these large arches set of two arches you can see the crease in the middle which is heavily weathered and could have been done by an ancient machine and here on the other side as well and look at the rougher work on the left hand side then the next set of arches once again we see a crease in the stone which looks like it could have been done by some kind of machine and here too more of the core drill holes once again see that crease in the arch and then the much cruder work on the left hand side and now we're walking towards a large wall and again we're going to see two different styles of construction you see the monoliths which look like they have cataclysmic damage of some kind on top and then the later pruder filling in work done by the Hittites and here further along these massive blocks of stone once again with almost perfect core drill holes in the middle I think in this case the holes were meant to hold these large stones together we saw about eight now we're going to get back to that green stone in a moment but again a very large megalithic block with almost perfectly circular drill holes the angle of the camera was bad in that instance but here you can see see the core drill hole you can even see where the drill mark is now as we walk towards a relatively crude wall we're going to focus on the stone there in the center here you can see four there's there are three at the moment we're going to see four more core drill holes and here is the large nephrite jade block that some believe was brought from Egypt though we weren't able to positively identify Egypt as the source quite well polished there are two of them located at Hattusha and here this is what we believe is the epicenter area of Hattusha you see again megalithic blocks almost all of the stone you've seen so far is limestone but the inner core part is actually granite the granite supposedly is from at least 150 kilometers away this is still the limestone you can see how eroded the surfaces are these ones used to fit together quite tightly and lots more of the ancient core drill holes with a lot of erosion even in the inside so this gives us indication a of lost ancient high technology and b extreme weathering over the course of a very extensive period of time there's a wall of ancient tight-fitting blocks at now we're entering as we see more of the core drill holes as I said we saw between 50 and 100 of them and we didn't actually cover the entire site it's quite massive but now we're going to start moving into the granite area more core drills and see that these stones at one time likely fit together without any mortar or cement or filler of any kind and now we are approaching the granite area once again in the limestone more of the core drill holes this technology was not developed as far as we know until about 1860 AD so obviously we have evidence here of and now saw marks circular saw mark there and there that is the granite dark colored stone looks very similar to the limestone but it is in fact granite brought from Ephesus which as I said is a very long distance away still in the country of Turkey and a straight saw mark as you can see here so there's more to the history of Turkey than most people realize clear evidence of lost ancient high technology there again is the straight or a straight saw mark this is Brian Forster and please pause the video if you wish to read this sign this was previous to our trip to the now famous Gobekli Tepe this is a site supposedly constructed by Antiochus in the first century BC and what's of particular interest are these tunnels there's this rather short tunnel with a cave in the back which clearly appears to have been hand done done with hand tools and then there is a sculpture in the location of Antiochus and Heracles and then this much much deeper tunnel which is actually quite incredible again it appears to be hand done or done with hand tools but it goes several hundred feet into the bedrock and then supposedly continues on for hundreds and hundreds of more there's steps going hundreds of feet down and then almost a slide like area at the bottom where it just keeps going and going there's Chester from our tour in September and then after that we decided to go see Mount Nemrut and Mount Nemrut again supposedly was a construction done by Antiochus in the first century BC and that is called a I think it's called a tumulus so it's made up of two different terraces the eastern terrace and the western terrace you can see the landscape of Turkey in the background and climbing up hundreds and hundreds of stairs to get to the actual location which has a number of sculptures so this is more or less the final leg of that journey on the way up and here we have a pyramidal structure of some kind made of large blocks but not of a megalithic nature necessarily but then we have the impressive location at the top of Mount Nemrut where there are a number of sculptures you can see the heads have fallen down or were knocked down why they haven't been put up back in place I don't understand because they're actually all not really that huge and I'm not sure who were the people who did the desecration of the site but as well unfortunately the sculptures were not as big as I had hoped though it's still a rather impressive site but the main focus of these early days in Turkey in September 2019 was to go to the famous Gobekli Tepe which has only been excavated I think for 20 years or less so the road there you can see we're going through agricultural areas it's relatively flat and then they just finished building an on-site museum as well of course as a gift shop as well as a small museum slash visitor center here which has a display of some of the artifacts this is the actual location in Turkey where Gobekli Tepe is and the interesting thing about it probably the most interesting thing is it's been dated to be as old as around 11,500 years old that would be just after the series of great cataclysms that hit the earth and so the oldest carbon dating and there's only been a little bit of carbon dating done on the site again is 11,500 years old so obviously a lot more of radiocarbon testing should be done in order to make that number solid so only about 1 30th of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated we've heard that there are some more excavations going on but not the amount that some would like and they've built this large tent-like structure over top of Gobekli Tepe in order to protect these large limestone t-shaped blocks some of them are up to 20 feet tall or six meters and weigh approximately 10 tons so this is a megalithic site but there's no sign of lost ancient high technology because this is limestone which is quite soft and we can clearly see the hand tool marks so what's most profound about Gobekli Tepe if proven conclusively is its amazing age it's about twice as old as any of the other ancient sites or civilizations that we know of so that would make it about five to six thousand years older than what is presumed to be the first civilization now nearby in a nearby town I believe it's called Urfa is an excellent museum again please pause on the video if you want to read this sign and it shows this which is presumed to be the oldest sculpture full-size sculpture ever found as well in this location we have a neolithic section and you can see that the carving and the sculptures are actually relatively crude so again Gobekli Tepe is a megalithic quote-unquote megalithic site it's not a site where we find examples of lost ancient high technology as we do in Peru and Bolivia and also in Egypt and other locations but Turkey does have a great megalithic high tech ancient high tech site called Hatusha which I will get to in an upcoming video and of course the standard way that it shows that the stones were moved I had heard from our guide that the quarry for the limestone is possibly 30 kilometers away so that's impressive it would have obviously taken more than two men to pull a stone of this size let alone the ones that are 10 tons or even more and also here is a great mock-up inside the museum of exact replicas of the Gobekli Tepe stones this gives you a great sense of scale because you're not allowed inside the Gobekli enclosure so I was very happy to visit Gobekli Tepe I was impressed by what ancient people did whether I will actually ever return again to Turkey I'm not quite sure because this was filmed in September of 2019 which is actually still the month as of the upload of the video and I'm more concerned in sites that show obvious lost ancient high technology which this site to me in no way displays