Siberia's Incredible 1,300 Year Old Mystery Fortress

just before we get to the video that you actually came here to watch let me tell you about a new channel that i'm running called decoding the unknown it's a show where i take a long deep dive into some of the world's biggest mysteries from what happened to the roanoke colonists to the regular guy who found a listening device in his power strip it's absolutely terrifying and it's always a bit of a wild ride you can find a link below i hope to see you over there [Music] poor bazine is a 1 300 year old isolated fortress surrounded by 10 meter high walls and one of the most inaccessible areas of the republic of tuva in siberia built on a small island in the center of lake terracol high in the mountains it's been cut off from all civilization and well preserved despite this when why and how it was built has left scientists and archaeologists baffled for over a hundred years when vladimir putin visited in 2007 he left saying i have been to many places i have seen many things but i have never seen anything of the kind it was first investigated by russian geographer and ethnographer dmitry clements in 1891 and excavated in the 1950s and 60s by archaeologist sevian weinstein they were able to prove that it was built during the cargonate period in the 8th century but not much more than that despite the huge amount of work that would gone into such a massive project in this remote location they were unable to uncover much of the cultural air at all meaning that it was never used [Music] before we get into the why it was built the first mystery to solve is the how it's a 7.5 acre site with more than 30 separate buildings and it occupies almost a whole island in the middle of a lake just getting the materials across the water and finding enough space for the builders to work would have been challenging enough without the minus 45 degrees celsius winters and plus 40 degrees celsius summers local legend gave the first clue to solving this one though it said that in ancient times there was no lake surrounding the fortress and a boy can a cell was born there with ears like a donkey one morning he saw water pouring from a well and he was frightened and quickly fled to the mountains with one of his servants when they turned and looked back they saw a huge lake that appeared surrounding poor bazin it got its name tara cole when khan got up waved his hands towards the lake and cried out an alarm tahal tahul and tur in mongolia means this and hall in tuvan means lake scientists set out to investigate and while the donkey years remain unproven and largely relevant to the story the sudden filling of the lake is not as far fetched as it sounds a study of the area with satellites revealed that the water level has both increased and decreased at a relatively short periods it's almost completely disappeared on several occasions most likely due to earthquakes cutting off or diverting the underground springs that feed it at the time of poor bazin's construction the lake was severely depleted and the fortress was built on a peninsula not an island so why was it built well let's start with what the archaeologists knew in tuvian the name for poor bazin means clay house but with 30 buildings it was clear it was much more than this they also knew the rough date of construction sometime in the 8th century the time when the ogres ruled the region finally the layout bore a striking resemblance to that of erdobalik the palace and capital of the urger cargonate the egocargonate was a turkic empire that covered much of central asia between 744 and 840 a.d it began life as an alliance between the nomadic tribes of the area who'd spent centuries fighting for either control of the region or simply the right to live there freely the yogas were just one of these tribes however through a seemingly endless list of alliances both made and broken victories over fellow tribes and the destruction of the turkish cargonate in 744 a.d they came out on top and formed a kingdom the ochre cargonate so to archaeologists it was fairly clear that poor bazin had been constructed by the yokos but what no one could figure out was why what could it have possibly been used for of course there were theories the three most plausible being a fortress a palace or a monastery the volatility of the region and the sheer number of conflicts in central asia at the time led some to conclude that a fortress made the most sense and in fairness poor bazin looks like a fortress their rectangular-shaped construction covers almost the entirety of the island leaving the lake as a natural moat and the outer walls are 10 meters high with bastions and the remains of a wooden fighting platform i mean it just sort of screams defensive structure however there's a major flaw in this theory it was built as a defensive structure so what was there to defend seriously i cannot emphasize enough how remote this place is initial hypotheses suggested that it could have acted as a guard post on the great silk road between china and europe however even the most noteworthy branches of the road were still about a thousand kilometers south of poor bazin as with everything else there were no military bases valuable resources or even a food warehouse anywhere near the site so perhaps it wasn't built for war but for peace to get there we have to look at what happened over the next couple of years in the ogre cargonate following the destruction of the turkish cargonate the leader of the yuga's kulig boiler took the title cutlet bilge colgan glorious wise mighty cargon and claimed himself as the supreme ruler of all the tribes he died just three years later in 747 a.d leaving the empire to his son baenchur khan this began a period of rapid expansion and the golden age of the uyghur empire bansha khan brought more tribes under the urga rule and built strong alliances with the neighboring chinese tang dynasty most notably he sent four thousand horsemen to aid emperor suzong during the rebellion of 755 a.d they were used to retake the chanan and lua yang and were handsomely rewarded not only did the ogre take home all of the silk that they could find in liu yang after three days of post-battle looting the tang gifted them an additional 20 000 rolls honorary titles a fixed horse trade price of 40 rolls of silk per horse and guest status when visiting tang china their bond was strengthened with an exchange marriage bayan cha khan married emperor suzong's daughter princess ningua and banja's daughter princess peja mari tang dynasty prince li chiang kai and what would you do once you married a princess well you build her a palace of course specifically one that would celebrate her tang heritage and allow her to be comfortable the striking similarity of the architecture of poor bajin to the chinese tang style buildings had already been noted by archaeologists in particular the northern curtain wall looked to have been constructed using the hangtu rammed earth method this involved the construction of a temporary frame adding a layer of earth pounding it to condense it as much as possible and then repeating until the wall was completed some ceilings were also constructed using the dong wong method or the chinese nail a sealing technique a series of brackets dowels and gongs were stacked and interlocked on top of the columns to support the weight of the roof poor bazin does however lack any form of heating system and in a climate where winter temperatures can drop to minus 45 celsius it's unlikely to have been designed for year round use so maybe it was less of a palace and more of a summer house this is given dubious way by the fact that local residents claim the family and their warriors enjoyed resting on the island so much that on dark nights you can still see 8th century ghosts on horseback visiting their favorite rest house even after their deaths of course there are a few holes in this theory too beyond the fact that ghosts are being used as supporting evidence firstly the architecture that was attributed to tang culture has now been proven to be of a distinctly ugher style secondly princess ninguo only ended up staying with the yogas for six months in 758 a.d as banjo died shortly after their marriage this wouldn't have been enough time to complete the palace and the princess didn't stay in it alone because the yogas wanted her to be buried alive with her husband instead the tang understandably objected to that plan and after some tense negotiations she was allowed to leave [Music] neither fortress nor palace was a great fit but without further evidence it seemed like a mystery that would be left unanswered however in 2012 fusa miyake a cosmic ray physicist at nagoya university in japan published findings in the journal nature that would not only solve this mystery but have the potential to solve other mysteries worldwide since the late 1940s and the work of willard libby we've used radiocarbon dating to calculate the year of death of any organic material found carbon exists in the atmosphere in one of three forms 12 and 13 which are stable and 14 which is radioactive and therefore has a half-life carbon-14 is made when cosmic rays enter the earth's atmosphere producing neutrons that collide with nitrogen 14 atoms creating carbon 14 and hydrogen plants and animals continually take in all three types of carbon through photosynthesis and their diets for as long as they're alive this refreshes the carbon-14 atoms in their cells however when a living thing dies it stops replacing its carbon and the amount of radiocarbon in its tissue steadily declines as we know the half-life of carbon-14 and that it decays at a constant rate it's therefore possible to establish an estimated date of death by measuring the residual amount of radiocarbon left in the tissue when found thousands of years later the only issue is it's not always that accurate sometimes only narrowing down the time of death within a decade or a century which in most cases isn't too problematic in the case of poor bazin though it's vital if the fortress was built before bayern sherkhan married the princess or after his death a one-year window it couldn't be a palace made for her archaeologists needed to know the exact year of construction and mj's work did just that in the past scientists believed that the amount of cosmic rays entering earth's atmosphere and creating carbon 14 was fairly constant varying between one and two percent miyake discovered this wasn't true when studying the tree rings of a 1 800 year old cedar she found a surge in radio carbon in 775 a.d of 12 and in 994 a.d of 9 which can only have been caused by an intense burst of cosmic radiation these events were named miyake events after their discoverer and can be used to conduct what's called wiggle matching this can determine the exact year a tree was cut and therefore the construction date of thousands of previously inaccurately dated buildings for example scientists already used the events to establish the exact date of construction of a swiss chapel holy cross chapel of the convent of saint john the baptist in valmester switzerland they've also conclusively proven that vikings and not christopher columbus were the first europeans to reach america this precise dating therefore has the potential to adjust or completely rewrite huge portions of human history but well what did it do for poor bazin in 2018 russian scientists obtained samples of larch from the walls of the fortress with reliable bark layers and sent them to the university of groningen in the netherlands one of the world's leaders in carbon dating there they discovered the miyake event in the third ring of the sample providing conclusive evidence that construction began in the summer of 777 a.d the discovery meant that researchers had been basing all of their poor begin theories on the wrong kagan baran shur khan died in 759 a.d instead they should have been looking at his son tangri boggy khan the third kagan of the ubers after taking power in 759 a.d tengri who is about as up for a fight as his dad did almost watch time in planning to invade the tang with 4 000 soldiers and 762 a.d however following the negotiations he joined them instead and the ogres helped once again in defeating the rebels at luyang and again looted the city unfortunately he went one step further than his father and chased the fleeing citizens to the buddhist temples they'd fled to and burned them down ten thousand people were killed before the tang paid them a hundred thousand pieces of silk to get them to leave this period is significant because during the campaign he met manachaean priests who converted him to manchester a dualistic religion based on the cosmic struggle between good and evil which tengri soon declared the official religion of the ogocargonate this supports the final theory for the reason of poor begins construction as a new official religion would surely warrant a new monastery what it doesn't explain however is why it was left unused and abandoned just two days after it was built [Music] to conclusively prove poor begin was built for religious purposes this last question must be answered and to do this we need to know what happened next in the yoga car grenade in 779 a.d tengri baghu khan decided once again to invade the tang dynasty this time under advice from the manichaean clergy his uncle tanbaga tarkan disapproved of the religion and strongly opposed the plans he tried to reason with tengri the tang is a great state and he never betrayed us last year we invaded taiwan and seized several tens of thousands of sheep and horses we could count that a great victory but because our way back was difficult and obstructed by the time we reached our home we were suffering from wounds we're tired and almost exhausted if we mobilize our forces again and do not gain a victory how will we return at all his pleas were unsuccessful well you might be thinking that this ten bag attack and sounds like a pretty reasonable guy and his anti-war sentiment seemed to set him apart from his violent family you'd be wrong when reason didn't work yet tengri killed along with two thousand of his family members and followers and declared himself kagan fairly on brand once ruler he began to suppress the manichaean religion proving the final piece of the puzzle for paul begin clearly he'd have no need for a manichaean monastery and so it was abandoned having never been used he ruled for 10 years until his death in 789 a.d and manichaean did eventually make a comeback as the official religion however by that time the monastery had been hit by two earthquakes and a fire restoration would have seemed futile as the potential for future earthquakes would have done any work in 2004 the government of tuva announced plans for the development and preservation of culture in tuva they included paul begin in their program and they aim to restore the site and create a porbergine fortress park however geology is not on their side more threatening than the earthquakes or fires porbegin is built on a permafrost plug isolated in the center of the unfrozen lake each year the edges of the permafrost thor and the shores of the island erode geologists predict that it only has 150 more years before the outer walls collapse marking the beginning of the end for the monastery [Music]

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 591,709

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects

Id: SAczNdysnsc

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022