Tartaria, or Tartary, was a real name that European mapmakers and writers used for the vast stretch of Central and Northern Asia between the Caspian Sea, the Urals and the Pacific, the lands of the Mongol, Tatar and other Turkic peoples. The modern Tartaria theory is something different: an internet-era claim, popular since about 2016, that a technologically advanced global empire built the grand architecture of the 1700s and 1800s and was then erased by a "mud flood" and a cover-up. The map label is genuine history; the hidden empire is not supported by the evidence.
It matters because Tartaria is one of the most shared alternative-history ideas online, and it is built on things people can see for themselves: old maps, half-buried windows, photographs of grand buildings that no longer stand. Each image has a documented story behind it, and walking through those stories is the fairest way to take the question seriously.
What was Tartary on old maps?
Tartary was a European geographic label, not the name of a single state. After the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, Europeans called the peoples of the steppe "Tartars," a spelling of Tatar whose extra "r" echoed Tartarus, the underworld of Greek myth. From the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, maps and travel books applied "Tartaria" to a huge, poorly known region of Asia bounded roughly by the Caspian Sea, the Ural Mountains, the Pacific and the northern borders of Persia, India and China.
As European knowledge improved, the label was divided. "Great Tartary" or "Russian Tartary" covered Siberia, "Little Tartary" meant the lands of the Crimean Khanate, "Chinese Tartary" referred to Manchuria and neighboring regions under Qing rule, and "Independent Tartary" described western Central Asia. By the mid-nineteenth century the word was fading, replaced by Siberia, Manchuria, Central Asia and Inner Asia.
So when a video shows an eighteenth-century map with "Tartaria" written across Asia, the map is real. What it shows is a European naming convention for many peoples and khanates, not a unified empire with its own architecture.
What does the modern Tartaria theory claim?
The modern theory claims that an advanced civilization, usually called the Tartarian Empire, once spanned the globe and was destroyed or hidden, often in the 1800s, with its achievements credited to others. There is no single official version, but the same claims recur. A worldwide "mud flood" buried cities, which is why many old buildings appear to have windows and doorways below street level. Ornate nineteenth-century capitols, courthouses and stations were Tartarian structures that later governments occupied. World's fairs showcased surviving Tartarian buildings, which were then deliberately demolished. The orphan trains that carried children across America repopulated the land after the catastrophe. Star-shaped forts prove a single global building culture, and spires and domes were part of a "free energy" network that drew power from the atmosphere.
Writing in Bloomberg CityLab in April 2021, journalist Zach Mortice quoted UC Irvine social psychologist Peter Ditto on the theory's "cafeteria quality": followers can accept some parts and leave others.
Where did the Tartaria theory come from?
The idea has two roots: Russian pseudohistory from the late twentieth century and internet video culture from the mid-2010s. The older root is the "New Chronology" of Anatoly Fomenko, a mathematician at Moscow State University and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who began publishing statistical arguments about historical dating around 1980 and, from the 1990s, popular books written largely with Gleb Nosovsky.
Fomenko argued that recorded history is drastically compressed and that a vast Slavic-Turkic empire, which he called the "Russian Horde" or "Great Tartaria," dominated Eurasia until the seventeenth century before being written out of the record. Historians reject the New Chronology outright; Moscow State University's own history faculty held a roundtable criticizing it in 1999. In Russian nationalist circles, "Tartaria" came to be treated as the "real" name of an older, greater Russia that Western history had supposedly ignored.
The global, architecture-focused version is much newer. Brian Dunning, in Skeptoid episode 765 (February 2021), traced the earliest videos to August 2016, when a YouTube creator named Philipp Druzhinin began posting about the mud flood. The r/Tartaria subreddit was founded in December 2018, and search interest rose sharply at the turn of 2019. As the idea spread in English, it largely shed its Russian nationalist framing and became a story about Victorian and Beaux-Arts buildings.
Why did the theory spread so fast?
Tartaria spread because it is visual, open-ended and built on a feeling many people share. Most of its evidence is a photograph, and images travel quickly on YouTube, TikTok and Reddit, where each viewer can add one more picture to the pile.
It also speaks to a real question. Many people look at a nineteenth-century railway station or post office, then at a glass box built last year, and wonder why the older building seems so much richer. Mortice argued that the theory channels that discontent with modern architecture. It also draws on a broader distrust of universities, museums and governments, which makes "they hid it from us" feel plausible before any evidence is weighed. The same mechanics, shared memories and confident images reinforcing each other, appear in the debate over the Mandela effect.
Were cities really buried by a mud flood?
No. The buried ground floors pointed to in Tartaria videos are well documented, and in the best-known cases the cities raised their own streets on purpose. Seattle is the clearest example. After the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, the city rebuilt in brick and stone and raised the street grade to fix flooding and sewage problems in the low-lying Pioneer Square area. Streets went up generally about 12 feet, and close to 30 feet in places.
Property owners built knowing their ground floors would end up below the new street, so they put the ornamentation on what would become the upper storefront. The old sidewalks and shopfronts below became the "Seattle Underground," which has been shown to visitors since Bill Speidel began his Underground Tour in 1965.
Chicago did something similar, for similar reasons. Low, waterlogged ground and a deadly cholera outbreak in 1854 pushed the city to adopt Ellis Chesbrough's sewer plan in 1856, which required raising the grade by several feet. Engineers lifted entire buildings on jackscrews: in 1860 a team including George Pullman raised a row of masonry buildings on Lake Street while businesses kept trading, and the Tremont House hotel was raised in 1861. Newspapers, engineering reports and city records describe the work as it happened.
Elsewhere, windows below grade are usually basements or light wells, and decades of repaving also raise street levels gradually.
What about the world's fairs, orphan trains and star forts?
Each has a paper trail. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the "White City," was designed under Daniel Burnham as a temporary city. Its grand facades were covered in "staff," a mix of plaster, cement and jute fiber painted white. The fair's official photographer, C. D. Arnold, documented it from construction in 1891 through its closing and aftermath; his photographs, now at the Chicago Public Library, show the buildings rising as frames and scaffolding. Most were demolished, and fires in July 1894 destroyed much of what remained. The Palace of Fine Arts survived and was completely rebuilt in permanent materials, reopening in 1933 as the Museum of Science and Industry. San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, designed by Bernard Maybeck for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, was likewise built of wood and staff and was demolished and reconstructed in concrete and steel between 1964 and 1974.
The orphan trains are also well recorded. Charles Loring Brace founded the Children's Aid Society in New York in 1853, and from 1854 to 1929 it and other agencies sent roughly 200,000 children from crowded East Coast cities to homes in the rural Midwest and West. The cause was urban poverty, documented in agency records, newspaper notices and riders' own accounts.
Star forts have engineers, treatises and construction accounts. The bastion fort, or trace italienne, developed in mid-fifteenth-century Italy as a response to gunpowder artillery: low, thick, angled walls removed blind spots and deflected cannon fire. The design spread across Europe from the 1530s and stayed in use for about three centuries. Palmanova in Italy was founded by Venice in 1593, and the works of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), military engineer to Louis XIV, are a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed in 2008. Similar shapes worldwide reflect a shared military science, spread by European engineers and colonial powers, not a lost empire.
The free-energy claims have no physical evidence behind them; domes and spires are older than electricity.
What the evidence shows
The evidence shows a real history that is remarkable in its own way. Tartary was a real word on real maps. Nineteenth-century cities really did lift buildings on jackscrews and bury their own streets, plaster palaces really were built in months and torn down, and children really were sent west on trains.
What the evidence does not show is a single global civilization behind all of it. Census returns, building permits, architects' drawings, contractors' ledgers, newspaper coverage and photographs of construction exist for the buildings the theory claims as Tartarian. As podcaster Nathaniel Lloyd put it to the Australian fact-checking service AAP in 2024, the theory requires a global disaster between the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age with no record of it anywhere. For how the genuine debate about lost or forgotten civilizations is framed by archaeologists, see our ancient civilizations timeline from Göbekli Tepe to Rome.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson has not endorsed the Tartaria theory on record, and this article does not attribute a position on it to him. What his work does offer is a method that applies directly to a claim like this one. His approach to ancient history starts with primary sources: read the tablet, the text or the record itself rather than someone's summary of it. Where possible, go to the site and see the stonework, the soil and the context in person. And bring the receipts: a claim earns attention when it comes with documents, measurements or physical evidence that others can check.
Applied to Tartaria, that method cuts both ways. It honors the instinct to question the official story and notice what is strange in old photographs, and it sends the investigator to the records that answer those questions: Seattle's post-fire regrading, Chicago's sewer commission reports, C. D. Arnold's construction photographs, the Children's Aid Society's files. Questioning the record while testing it against evidence is what 4biddenknowledge means by forbidden knowledge: material left out of the approved story, read carefully and on its own terms.
Watch, read and go deeper
The 4BK TV series Unsolved takes on mysteries and open questions that sit on the edge of mainstream history. For another case where an old idea about a hidden world met modern evidence, read our guide to the hollow earth theory. The Anunnaki topic hub collects the site's work on ancient origins and lost-civilization debates, and the ancient civilizations timeline places those debates in sequence.
Frequently asked questions
Was Tartaria a real place?
Tartary, or Tartaria, was a real name used on European maps from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries for a large region of Central and Northern Asia. It covered the lands of the Mongol, Tatar and other Turkic peoples and was later subdivided into Great, Little, Chinese and Independent Tartary. It was a geographic label for many peoples and states, not a single empire.
What is the mud flood theory?
The mud flood theory holds that a global flood of mud buried cities, often dated to the 1800s, and destroyed an advanced civilization. Supporters point to buildings whose lower windows sit below street level. In documented cases such as Seattle and Chicago, those levels were buried when cities deliberately raised their streets for drainage and sewers.
Who started the Tartarian Empire theory?
It has no single founder. Its name and idea of a suppressed Eurasian empire draw on Anatoly Fomenko's New Chronology, developed in Russia from around 1980. The modern, architecture-focused version took shape online, with mud flood videos appearing on YouTube from August 2016 and Reddit communities forming in 2018.
Were the world's fair buildings demolished to hide something?
No. Fair buildings such as those of the 1893 Chicago exposition were designed as temporary structures, with plaster-and-fiber facades over temporary frames. Their construction was photographed from 1891 onward, and most were demolished or burned after the fair closed. The few that survive were rebuilt in permanent materials.
Why are star forts found all over the world?
Star forts, or bastion forts, were a European military design developed in fifteenth-century Italy to resist cannon fire. European engineers and colonial powers built them across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia over the following centuries. Their shared shape reflects a shared military science, documented in engineering treatises and construction records.
Sources and further reading
- Anatoly Fomenko, History: Fiction or Science? Chronology, volume 1 (English edition, 2003).
- Zach Mortice, "Inside the 'Tartarian Empire,' the QAnon of Architecture," Bloomberg CityLab (April 2021).
- Brian Dunning, "Tartaria and the Mud Flood," Skeptoid episode 765 (February 2021).
- Moritz Maurer, "The Tartarian Empire," World Religions and Spirituality Project (2026).
- C. D. Arnold Photographic Collection, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago Public Library.
- Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (University of Chicago Press).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Fortifications of Vauban" (inscribed 2008).
