Otherworld - Deep Research: Tartaria

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

As our team grinds away on upcoming October episodes, we've decided to unlock an old Deep Research episode from our Patreon. We are currently on the search for stories that we can work on for October, so if you have experienced something unexplainable, please send us a short written summary of your story at [e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, other world listeners, believe it or not, right now, we are already starting to prep for our October episodes. It is also my birthday coming up this week. So for that reason, I thought it would be a good week to unlock one of our classic Patreon episodes onto the main feed. Like I said, we are already in full interview mode for October. So if you have experienced something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained, send us your story at Stories at Otherworldpod.com. I'd say right now I am especially looking for terrifying ones for this season. So send in your stories.

If you've already sent one in and haven't heard back, my apologies, we do get so many emails. In fact, I'm going through a lot of unread ones right now. We do eventually read all of them, I promise. If you have a crazy one and you think we might have missed it, feel free to email again. I'm looking forward to reading these. Once again, the email is Stories at Otherworldpod.com.

So, this episode that we're unlocking is one of my favorites. It's from a series of episodes that Joshua Ciderrella did for Otherworld called Deep Research. Joshua is a brilliant guy and an incredible researcher. In these episodes, he takes a conspiracy theory, fringe belief, or a topic that might sound questionable. or far-fetched to the average person, and then he does his very best to research it thoroughly and see if there is any truth to it. In this episode, Josh investigates Tartaria,

a vast conspiracy theory involving lost civilizations, architecture, and something called the mud flood. I think you're going to enjoy this one. If you want to hear more episodes like this and others, you could find them on the Other World Patreon. Welcome to Otherworld. Beneath the cloak of time, where history's murmurings echo, lies the enigmatic tapestry of Tartaria,

a conspiracy woven with threads of intrigue and obscure truths, a lost civilization, possessing great technology, far beyond our comprehension, covered in time by a great mud flood and erased from our collective consciousness. Did Tartaria truly exist? A beacon of sophistication and influence?

Or is this narrative but a mirage conjured by the conspiratorial winds that blow through the corridors of speculation? A tale imagined by middle-aged men who smoke the synthetic weed that they sell at gas stations. Join us, dear listener, as we join our host to unravel the great mysteries of our world. Joshua Citarella, a luminary at the forefront of contemporary art, a researcher and a trailblazer

whose work transcends the confines of the present, offering a glimpse into the future of innovation and intellectual discourse. A man who once nearly killed himself by poisoning after accidentally purchasing the wrong type of oven. Welcome to deep research. Welcome back to the podcast. Tonight, I'd like to talk to you about the lost civilization of Tartaria, aka Great Tartaria, Grand Tartary, or the Tartarian Empire. Tartaria is an old-world civilization with advanced technology and architecture that spanned the entire globe. It was an era of peace and prosperity, with abundant resources and energy,

until it was wiped out by a catastrophic mud flood, an unpredictable event of extreme weather with devastating consequences. I first heard about this theory from at Vitruvian Grimmis on Instagram, a wise sage with masterful and encyclopedic knowledge of all esoteric topics. Also, a great meme poster. If you've spent time on the sketchier parts of the internet, you have undoubtedly heard of the Great Reset. This is the World Economic Forum's recovery plan post-pandemic,

or, as some people say, the plan for the New World Order to take over, I'll let you decide for yourself. Tartaria is the theory that humanity, has already lived through a great reset, and that we are currently in the new era of civilization without knowledge of our true past. This global reset may have occurred as little as 100 years ago. All of the history leading up until that point is a fabrication. Today's societies have colluded to suppress and tear down the few remaining architectural achievements from Tartaria in order to erase the evidence and remove all traces of the civilization that came before us.

adherence of this theory proposed that demolished buildings such as the singer building in New York, the original Penn Station, also in New York, or the temporary grounds of the 1915 World Fair, were actually the buildings of a vast empire that has been erased from history. The evidence for this is all around us. Tartarian architecture consists of an ornamented, gilded age style, with majestic elevations and intricately detailed enclosures. many buildings have columns, vast domes, decorative terracotta exteriors, and noticeable spires on the top. In fact, these spires were designed to collect free energy from the air because they were Tesla coils.

And this powered a global and prosperous society without any pollution or waste. This is a viral video I grabbed from TikTok, and this should give you a sense of what we're about to explore tonight. So Tartaria was thought to be a global and technologically advanced civilization that existed way before the 1800s up until the 1900s where it was wiped out by a great reset, aka the mud flood. And it was completely erased from the history books and rewritten in order to hide us from the truth. Now, I know this sounds crazy, but I brought the receipts. Comes directly from the CIA's website. It was released in 1957. The Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a directive ordering the party's Tartar Provincial Committee to preempt. proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria.

In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten. Let Us Be Frank was to be falsified. And why would Tartaria be depicted in old world maps if it wasn't a thing? Now, take a look at some of these buildings. We were told that these were built by people that rode in horse and buggies. We're expected to believe that they built things like this with a hammer and a chisel. These people were way more advanced that we give them credit for. Like, these buildings are said to have been built in the 1800s.

The math ain't math and now this civilization was thought to have been wiped out by a huge flood that buried it in feet of mud, which was also known as the mud flood. And that is why we see so many buildings that look like they have just been buried or that have basement windows and doors. And this would be kind of a stretch if they didn't dig up the buildings and find that they were in fact buried. And I know you're probably wondering like why the heck would they hide this from us. But it was thought that Tartarians actually knew how to harvest free energy from the Earth's magnetic field or ether. Now on that note, I'm going to leave you with one more thought. Who are these doors built for? And if you're wondering, those giant doors were built for giants,

which were, of course, common in the Empire of Tartaria and explains the prevalence of massive domed ceilings, giant doors, and elevations much larger than human proportions. We'll return to this part of the story in a moment. The main argument coming from Tartaria theorists is the existence of similar architectural styles around the world. These include an extensive list, so I'll just name a few of them here. St. Petrie's Church in Berlin, the Crystal Palace in London,

constructed in 1851, destroyed in 1936, New York's Pennsylvania Station, which opened in 1910, and was demolished in 1963, the Marlborough Building in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Erie County Savings Building in Buffalo, New York, 1893, the Gilner Building in NYC, built in 1896, demolished in 1936, demolished in 1910. You can start to notice the trend here. The San Francisco Call Building in 1898. The New York World Building, constructed in 1890, demolished in 1955,

the Iowa City University General Hospital, the Boston Post Office in 1885, and in particular, the entire city of San Francisco, which was leveled in 1906 by an earthquake, as I was taught. but the Tartarian theorist claimed that this was in fact a controlled demolition. So we have a rough timeline emerging here around 1900. There's some kind of reset that happened, and the new societies, meaning the countries we know today, U.S., Canada, China, Brazil, and so on, the governments we recognize today, all begin to destroy these buildings to erase the evidence of the society that came before. Much of the Tartaria theory videos, articles, and posts contrast old.

photos of incredibly ornate and majestic buildings depicted next to simple horse and buggy carriages around the turn of the century. Muddy streets are filled with impoverished people, scurrying about their business, while grand architecture looms above them in the background. The Lost Empire of Tartaria. As you can see, it's depicted in many old maps. During this time period, all of these amazing structures were built. It was a unified civilization with advanced technology, and they mastered the ability to have free energy for the entire city. And yet history wants us to believe that people that rode around in horse and buggies built all of this.

So we're only a few minutes in, and we already have a full bingo on the esoteric checklist. There's antiquatech, advanced technology from an ancient civilization. We have cryptids, if you're willing to count giants. We've got lost civilization, but also sunken civilization. We have a two-for-one on this. and of course, free energy. Who could do without? So who actually believes this?

I spent the last week doing some survey research and I uncovered a scattered network of video makers and posters across various online platforms. Starting with YouTube, we have a large account called John Levy with 276,000 followers. My personal favorite is a channel called Mind Unveiled with 250,000 followers. I'm going to read just a few of the video titles

here because they're really something unique and special. The Bible is Tartarian exposed? Is magic evil? Tartaria explained, part four, ancient EMF technology. Homonculus unveiled. Jesus, artificial generation, lost esoteric secrets. This is, I've spent a lot of time with this channel recently. We also have Martin Leitka, aka Flat Earth British, who explores a civilizational reset before Tartaria, He claims that Tartaria is actually the second reset, and there was one that preceded it. Additionally, there is Tales of the Old World and Tartaria Meltdown, both around 18K.

There's a few communities on Reddit. We have Tartarian architecture with 11,000 followers, and the main one, which is just R-slash Tartaria, 33,000 followers. But, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of this content is highly concentrated on TikTok. The hashtag Tartaria on TikTok has 865 million views. 865 million. Now, I have done many deep dives into all sorts of weird niche internet cultures. My sense is that on YouTube, it's a really small group of true believers. There's these kind of two big accounts that produce most of the content in long form video.

Reddit is mostly people posting beautiful buildings, but it's not really substantiated. in long form argument. Tartaria thrives overwhelmingly with esoteric influencers on TikTok. The views are 10 to 1, 100 to 1 any other platform. And I think there's a few reasons for this. It's visually compelling. These are some of the most incredible architectural achievements you'll ever see. They're just beautiful exteriors and interiors. The story also fits neatly into a one-minute format. You don't really have to go in-depth in a TikTok video. My sense is that there's not really much of a grassroots community on TikTok. I think this is something that is latching onto other conspiracy lore, and it's well-suited for the algorithm. It's really

being pushed by a variety of influencers on TikTok. It tends to thrive in that format, 10x, 100x, anywhere else. And once you go through a few of those videos, your algorithm starts to get very, very weird. Is the government hiding an entire civilization from us? The Taratarians were said to be a civilization that unlocked the key to free energy, allowing the Tartarians to advance exponentially as citizens were allowed to express their creativity freely without the stress of work, leading to many great inventions and grand architecture. However, a powerful organization that controlled the world through the cell of energy had already invested heavily into energy production and lobbied against Tartaria.

This organization tore Tartaria apart and erased them from our history books, making it seem like Tartaria never existed. But if you look carefully, the evidence of Tartaria is still there, in old maps, in architecture around the world that seemed to advance. Let's take a moment to observe the significance of this photograph. Look at this man's height in comparison to this light pole. These people were literally giants. Could this explain why we see these enormous doors and structures throughout the world? Like, look how massive this door is compared to us humans. And you can even see the handles that here. Who was opening and closing this door because we couldn't even reach it. These entrances were made for certain beings, giants. For the most part, dinosaurs, to my knowledge, are something

scientists just say was here before we got here. How do we really know those fossils didn't belong to something else? Because scientists just recreated the structures and assumed that it looked like this. We don't really know what it looked like. I believe that majority of those skeletons belong to giants. For whatever reason, that part of history is trying to be hidden from us. Okay. So let's look at the evidence for Tartaria. Let's try to make the best case possible for the existence of Tartaria. I've condensed these into three main points. We have number one mud flood windows. This is windows that are partially below ground. The buildings appear as if they were buried. We also have this CIA document that frequently gets mentioned on TikTok. There is, of

course, the Tesla coil, the field of, quote, free energy. This part is actually, this is really interesting. And lastly, we have Tartaria's clear, undeniable existence on old colonial maps. You can see it with your own eyes. We'll find out what the story is behind that. So mud flood windows, in some cases, these are just basement windows. That's not especially convincing. But, more curiously, when you excavate cities, you do actually see many below-ground floors. Some of the images that are posted reveal the foundations of buildings that can extend many, many floors down. A six-story building may be almost as tall below as it is above the ground. And this is so it doesn't shift around. It has a firm foundation. It doesn't shake with earthquakes. Curiously, these

foundations also include passageways, literal holes that resemble windows and doors to install plumbing, cabling, and so on. But seeing this revealed in a Reddit post out of context, it does look extremely convincing. If you dig up the foundation around a city block, it visually appears like there's a whole other city beneath it. It's kind of wild to see. What's more interesting, though, is that some cities actually raise the ground level, and they do this strategically to prevent flooding. They move Earth into the low-lying areas and build up the ground level to prevent overflow. Chicago did this in the 1850s and 60s.

Seattle did it in 1889, raising some areas as much as 8 feet. Chattanooga famously did it between 1875 and 1905, raising the ground between 3 and 15 feet in some places. Today you can tour underground Chattanooga. Many parts of the new city are built on top of the old one that would frequently flood. Underground city tours are fun and very spooky. you can literally buy tickets for them on Eventbrite. It's not very hidden. I feel like this first one we can reasonably dismiss. But the second piece of information, the CIA document, is indeed real. It's real,

and I found it on the CIA's website. Everybody mentions it. I track down the original. It is not hidden. It's actually public information. In 1998, the CIA declassified a document, which, they had produced in 1957, a section within the document mentions the existence of the Tartarian civilization. In other words, Tata history was to be rewritten. Let us be frank, was to be falsified in order to eliminate references to the great Russian aggressions and to hide facts of the real centre of Tatar Russian relations. A book that covers Tartaria very well is, is the James William Lee book called The One World Tartarians, the greatest civilization ever to be erased from history.

And in the book, he explains how the historical presence of Tartaria was deliberately censored and deleted. I'll read the full quote in context here. On the 9th of August in 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issued a directive order to the party's Tartar Provincial Committee. to proceed with a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalist character

committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history. In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten, let us be frank, was to be falsified, in order to eliminate references to great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tartar Russian relations. And this was no isolated case. Now, the quote usually ends there, but literally the next sentence is, Every Muslim area within the USSR, historians on orders of the Communist Party,

have rewritten history to distort the facts so that the Russians always appear in a good light. Needless to say, histories which present the facts truthfully have been withdrawn and destroyed, so that the present and future generations of Muslims are forever denied the chance of learning the true facts of their nation's past. So despite what the TikTokers are claiming, this document is actually the CIA criticizing the Soviet Union for rewriting history. The CIA has nothing to do with Tartaria. Under Stalin in 1944, the USSR rewrites history all on their own. They want to create a narrative that includes the ethnic group Tartars, this is the Muslim population, who has no relation to the supposed ancient empire of Tartaria because they only moved there,

a few decades earlier. The Tartar's name was applied in reference to the region, modern-day Siberia, but the Tartar people had only recently emigrated from Crimea, and thus could not be the original inhabitants of the previous great empire. I'm sure Tartaria theorists will throw all of this out as a falsification, but at least I tried. In this case, the Soviet Union is trying to invite the ethnic group Tartars in. They want them to become good communist citizens,

but they choose to do it in a very duplicity. The CIA rightly and correctly criticizes the Soviets for falsifying history. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. This is a cavity magnetron. This thing is basically a high-powered vacuum tube that generates microwaves. The microwaves that it emits can act as a source of free energy. This is a cathedral window, and this is the magnetron.

Do you see the similarities? In the center of the magnetron is called a cathode. What does that word sound like? Cothod sounds like cathedral. They are corrupting the truth with lies. Now look at this. The intent is used to harvest the energy. Boom.

This is located all over the world. This means that at one point in time, humans were a unified civilization. They all knew something. They all knew how to do this. You see how the ether energy is being harvested into the domed resonator? These structures are located all over the world.

Look at that. The domed resonator and the antenna. This is a motherboard. This is located inside the computer. And look what it looks like. It resembles cities. Our Earth is just a giant power grid. It's meant to distribute the free energy. Topic three, free energy is actually, this is really fascinating, I have to admit. Tesla coils, if you are not familiar with them, this is a metal conduit that usually has an oblate orb on the top of it. It's like a steel ball on the top. You can see similar features on the Tartarian buildings.

And Tesla coils are, they're really cool. They're really cool because you can literally send electricity through the air. Invisibly, miraculously, magically, you can send electricity through the air. If you hold a light bulb near a Tesla coil, the light bulb will turn on. Not plugged into anything, the light bulb just miraculously turns on. That's because it's powered through an invisible electrical field. generated by the Tesla coil. If it sounds absurd, just type it into YouTube.

You can see this for yourself. You can actually make these at home. I strongly recommend that you don't because it can kill you. You will probably get electrocuted, so please just watch a video on YouTube. Tesla invented the coil in 1891, and it is, to be clear, an incredible feat of real science. This happens because the coil creates a field of electricity that radiates through the air. But this is also its biggest drawback because that energy is not directed. Imagine you're powering directly to a device through a wire.

All of that energy goes to the single light bulb. It's extremely efficient. In the Tesla coil, the energy is radiating just in a sphere around the device itself. So you might be picking up on 1% of the energy, but the overwhelming majority, 99% of it is lost. It just dissipates into the air. So because it's not efficiently directed, a lot of it just goes to waste. Additionally, it only works within a few inches to feet radius. So, for example, if you are on like the other side of the couch, you would not be able to charge your phone if the Tesla coil was like six feet away. They are in some cases used to transmit

low frequency radio waves, but the electric current simply can't reach far enough to be used to power our devices. It looks like literal magic. It's incredible to see, but the application is extremely limited. Most importantly, other than the very loose formal similarity between the Tartarian spires and the Tesla coil,

there is seemingly no evidence to make one think that the spires conducted electricity, much less an explanation for how it was stored or directed. Other than TikTokers literally pointing at an old photo, there is not one document that supports this claim. I have spent a week searching for this, so if you do find one, please send me a DM and tell me. Perhaps this is almost too obvious to say, but Tesla coils merely dispense energy from another source. They can radiate the field of electricity

that will wirelessly power a light bulb, but the coils themselves need to be plugged in. I know this sounds silly, but I want to be absolutely clear because some people on the internet are very confused about this last part. Just because you can wirelessly transmit the energy from the coil to the light bulb does not mean that the coil is wirelessly receiving electricity. Pull up those YouTube videos and you can just see the plug in the corner. It is plugged in. It's not just magically generating electricity. TikTokers try to get around this by saying that the coil somehow harnesses electricity from the air or the Earth's magnetic field, but I'm very sorry to disappoint everyone. That part does not work. Previously, we did a whole episode on abiotic oil.

I encourage you to go back and listen. The myth of free energy is a powerful motif that occurs in a lot of this material. A lot of conspiracy content has buried within it, a utopian dream of a society without skin, scarcity. They hope for abundance and energy and optimism. There's a sense that the technology of the world today is incomplete, that the project of history is incomplete. We'll talk a bit more about that in the conclusion. Lastly, we have this question of the old maps. Some of these are up to 400 years old. They span the 16th to 19th centuries, and they label a huge area around Russia as tartary, tartarian, Great Tartaria, Grand Tartary, and so on.

I think it's important to place some context on this that when Christopher Columbus sailed in 1692, remember, he literally expected to land in China. Europeans knew very little about geography outside of the most popular and highly trafficked trade routes. Tartaria is the European name for the region, the geographic area, but not a political body or a certain kingdom.

It's like saying South America as opposed to Brazil. One is a region, the other is a state. Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, broadly, Eurasia is labeled Tartaria. It doesn't have a lot of natural resources at the time, and it's not sufficiently explored for trade. Importantly, Tartaria is not in reference to the modern day Tartars. That's a different group. Tartars has referenced various peoples at different times, including the political Empire of Mongolia, which later becomes synonymous with the geographical region. These terms are

over hundreds of years. They become interchangeable. But Tartaria theorists are going to argue that all of this was actually suppressed because the Empire of Russia took the Tartarian kingdom over. Old glossaries of maps do include a Tartarian flag. There is a black dragon on a yellow color field. Coincidentally, the Russian imperial flag features a knight on horseback, crushing a black dragon under the rider's lance. That's proof enough for me. What I see when I look at these Tartarian images, grand buildings next to peasants on horseback,

is the extreme wealth inequality at the turn of the century. This is like taking a picture of an Amazon fulfillment center employee in front of Jeff Bezos's house. I don't see any mystery, just an extreme concentration of resources. There's obviously the surface-level aesthetic observation that old buildings are pretty and new buildings are made of steel and glass and they're kind of ugly. I tend to agree with this, actually. In an art historical context, much of the Tartarian architecture is what we would call Bozard, from the Eco de Bozard in France, which translates to the

School of Fine Arts. This is where students would be trained in classical architecture. I would personally prefer to live in a city full of beautiful buildings, but what happened shortly after the turn of the century is that factory-produced materials like steel and concrete and glass became much, much cheaper, and artisan labor became way more expensive. As a result, architects could no longer afford to use the old materials and decorative style, and had to transform their works to fit the funds and materials available. There's a great video about this by Mia Mulder on YouTube. The video is called The Futuristic Empire that Never Existed, big fan of that video. For a bit of Further context, there's a piece in Bloomberg by Zach Mordas called Inside the Tartarian Empire,

the Q&ONN of Architecture. Now, this is, to be honest, this is sensational and inaccurate. People love to call everything Q&ON just to drive traffic and drive clicks. I would say it's much more like the flat earth of architecture. I think that's a more reasonable and less sensationalist claim. But Mordis goes on to write that, quote, before the Industrial Revolution, labor was cheap, so paying artisans to sculpt elaborate masonry, even for relatively humble structures, wasn't a great expense it seems today,

when labor prices are higher and factory-made steel, concrete, and glass is cheap. That's why we see so much of these materials and buildings today, and so much less filigreed terracotta. So, after wasting a week of my life plumbing the depths of the internet, I have to say that I am thoroughly unconvinced. Usually when I do the deep dive on a piece of internet folklore, I find some shred of evidence or really uncertain fact that holds the story together. But in the case of Tartaria, I think we're seeing something a bit different. Social media has obviously changed a lot in the past few years, with phenomena like fake news and disinformation and so on. I think Tartaria is

silly and cute enough to skate by all the algorithmic filters without getting flagged. Basically, this is the sanitized version of some more wild conspiracy theories, and because it exists in this limbo of entertainment and a low risk for harm, it's basically able to circulate without too much friction. Additionally, a lot of content creators who may have been posting more extreme things a few years earlier are now posting about Tartaria, because it's one of the few bits of esoteric content that won't get their account de-platformed. Like many esoteric theories, the Tartarian narrative appeals to people for a good reason. In today's society, many of us are downwardly mobile. Each generation is having a harder time than the last.

The boomers did better than Gen X. Gen X did better than millennials. And the zoomers on TikTok have it even harder still. So the idea that we are living in the ruins of a great society, from before is kind of true. That story resonates with a lot of us. But it doesn't mean that we have to throw out all of history for literally, and I stress this, literally no evidence other than influencers pointing at old photographs. Ideas like antiquatech invert notions of the future in the past. We're used to thinking of the future as an optimistic time, technology is getting better, things are progressing onward and upward, and the lived experience of today seems really incongruent with that idea. So Antiquatech as a concept really appeals to people because this

idea of further progress into the future, more prosperity, the abundant and optimistic future that we were taught to expect, all of that seems very improbable today. So in terms of a myth structure, Tartaria absolutely resonates with people. And I think that's very understandable. Ideas of free energy, allegories of abundance. In today's society with extreme scarcity, it's really clear why that resonates with people. In the scope of this research,

I'm interested to do the deep dive on a variety of different topics, esoteric, conspiracy theory, internet folklore, and such. All of those things I want to get to the truth. I'm always interested to find that kernel of truth that you don't expect when you first crack open the story. Topics like Tartaria that, no pun intended, have very little of a foundation to stand on, ultimately work against that truth-seeking impulse.

So to promote this story as something that is legitimate and worthy of investigation, I find that to be very disingenuous. I think there's a lot of people basically chasing clicks and views and search engine optimization because the topic seems to be trending. but the idea of standing this thing upright as if it's worthy of serious investigation, after looking into it for a week, watching hours of video, browsing all of these communities, I am totally and utterly unconvinced. At Vitruvian Grimmis, I've traveled great lengths. I come seeking the true esoteric knowledge of Tartaria.

Please share your wisdom. Patience mortal. The true power of Tartarian architecture cannot be understood by those who, have not walked the path. This knowledge is far deeper and more ancient than your four-dimensional mind can comprehend. How tall were the giants? Did they have one in every town? Or was the whole town giants? Were the giants like in charge of the humans? Or did the giants work for the humans? Also, why didn't the humans get covered by the mud and the giants survived because they were taller? Silence, boor. You are not prepared to accept the truth of the full Fumenco chronology.

The Levishal of revelations tell us that lunar fragments from the explosion of Earth's moon shattered the continents into separate empires. Tartaria is more ancient than your feeble mind can even imagine. You are not prepared. So, we are deep enough into the podcast where all the kids have gone to bed. I mentioned before that Tartaria is the sanitized social media version of some more radical ideas. In particular, the story is highly similar to Anatoly. Famanco's new chronology. This is an extensive seven-volume research project, in air quotes, research project, so-called, where he uses astronomy and lunar cycles to revise basically all of known

history. Looking back at various historical events, he disputes the years these events are claimed to have occurred, and instead uses astronomical calculations to deduce their supposed date. And while that sounds mathematical and somewhat scientific, it also means that all of antiquity, including the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece, and Egypt, actually occurred during the Middle Ages. Basically, because of some old charts and paintings that depict a few constellations out of place, we have to throw away a thousand years of recorded history. In a political context, Femenko is a Russian nationalist and has a biased interpretation of basically everything, his goal is pretty explicitly to rewrite known history to center Russia as the

central figure, including rewriting Russian history to valorize a grand past and instill a sense of nationalistic pride. I'll read the description of one of his books here. The title is History, Fiction or Science, Chronology Volume 4. Quote, The Consensual World History was manufactured in Europe in the 16th through 19th century. with a political agenda of the powers of that period on the basis of an erroneous clerical chronology. By the middle of the 16th century, Europe had reached superiority in the sciences and technologies,

but was still inferior militarily to the empire of Eurasia. The concerted effort of European aristocracy, Catholic clergy, Protestants, humanists, and scientists in the 15th through 17th centuries was the creation and dissemination of a fictional ancient world, which served its political agenda. The fictional ancient world was created by representing the events of the 11th through 16th centuries as ones that happened thousands of years before, according to the ancient sources they invented. A considerable part of the European aristocracy, who were refugees from Byzantine,

and or the inheritors of Eurasian warlords, supported the myth of the ancient world to justify their claims to the countries they ruled. Now, skipping forward a bit, this goes on for quite a long time, and this is mind you just the description of the book, not the seven-volume project. Why oh why do mainstream historians not gratify prominent mathematician Dr. Famenco with laurels, but instead call the riot police. For example, the English historians rage at the suggestion that the history of ancient England was de facto a Byzantine import transported to English soil.

by the fugitive Byzantine nobility. As a sign of recognition of the special role of the English historians who consider themselves the true scribes of world history, the cover of the present book portrays Jesus Christ crucified on Big Ben. Now, this is where it gets really interesting. Dr. Femenko asserts that there was no such thing as the Tartar or Mongol invasion, followed by over two centuries of slavery,

providing a formidable body of documented evidence to support his assertion. The so-called Tartars and Mongols were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a trilingual state with Arabic and Turkic spoken as freely as Russian. The ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities, and the hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription. Their invasions were punitive operations against the regions that attacked, tax evasion. Dr. Femenko proves that official Russian history is a blatant forgery, concocted by a host of German scholars brought to Russia by the usurper dynasty of the Romanovs.

Their ascension to the throne was the result of a conspiracy, so they charged those German historians with the noble mission of making the Romanovs reign look legitimate. End quote. So here you have it. The true history of Russia is actually the great Tartarian Empire. The Romanov Tsars fell to the Bolsheviks, so it's hard to rally nationalists around a regime that has already and recently fell. Instead, Famenco invents an entirely new civilization to rally people to his cause, achieving a great and powerful empire that is not burdened with the terrible history of either the Soviet Union or the brutal reign of the Russian Tsars. All of it is entirely made up. It is purely ideological.

There are literally a thousand years of recorded history that dispute it. But the desire for some people to believe this, especially in the context of a collapsing Soviet Union, is extremely powerful. Whenever societies are going through a difficult period, the human desire to create a new narrative that inspires us and gives us something to aspire to can become extremely compelling. I've spent the last week immersing myself in this lore. I've watched way too many YouTube videos. I've scrolled way too many meme accounts. I have thoroughly poisoned my brain at this point. Walking around the city,

I do find myself looking up at old buildings and looking down at mud flood windows. It feels silly at first, but it's an oddly compelling story. Generally, I think Tartaria is pretty low risk. I don't think a lot of people actually believe this. I don't think we should ban it. I don't think it's a danger to society.

But I also, I don't want to consider completely dismissed that some of the people in these communities might believe a whole bunch of other things that are a bit more extreme than what they can say publicly. That may exist. I try to approach these things with a cool head. I try to give a compassionate reading. For me, the only real solution to all of this is to fix the external circumstances and address the real crises in society. And once those problems are solved, the number of people who believe in conspiracies, all of the sudden goes way down. People don't need to create a fictional reality because the actual reality is quite good. Now, it's not utopia. You're still going to get a tummy ache.

You still can get your heartbroken. But maybe we won't also be wrecking the planet and the economy at the same time. Once that's out of the way, we can return to addressing the real, unsolved questions of the human experience, things like spirituality, self-fulfillment, the great mysteries of the human consciousness, all of that really important stuff. So those are my thoughts on Tartaria. I hope you like the episode, and I will see you in a better future soon.