Varosha — Maraş in Turkish — was the southern quarter of Famagusta and, by the early 1970s, the most glamorous beach resort in the eastern Mediterranean. A wall of modern high-rise hotels lined a long ribbon of fine sand, and the district drew an international jet-set clientele, with celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot among its reputed visitors. It was the engine of Cypriot tourism, generating a large share of the island’s hotel capacity and foreign earnings, and home to a settled population of roughly 39,000 Greek Cypriots living among the shops, apartments and businesses behind the hotel strip.
That world ended in August 1974, during the second phase of the Turkish military intervention that followed a Greek-junta-backed coup in Cyprus. As Turkish forces advanced on Famagusta, the Greek Cypriot inhabitants of Varosha fled, almost all of them expecting to return within days once the fighting subsided. They never did. Instead of opening the district to its owners or to new settlers, the Turkish army fenced Varosha off, posted guards, and forbade entry to everyone except the military and the United Nations.
For half a century the quarter has stood frozen — shop mannequins still in shattered windows, cars rusting where they were parked, hotel rooms slowly collapsing as roofs fail and vegetation pushes up through the streets. Because it was sealed rather than demolished, Varosha became the world’s most famous ghost town and a uniquely literal example of a community erased by abandonment under guard. Its fate was bound to the larger, unresolved division of Cyprus, and successive United Nations resolutions called for it to be handed to UN administration and its rightful inhabitants allowed home.
That status held until October 2020, when Turkish Cypriot authorities, backed by Ankara, reopened a strip of the beachfront and adjacent streets to day visitors. The move was widely condemned internationally as a unilateral change to Varosha’s status in breach of UN resolutions, and it transformed a sealed ruin into a contested tourist curiosity while doing nothing to restore the homes or rights of the people who fled in 1974.
Aghdam was an Azerbaijani city on the edge of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, a regional administrative and commercial center whose name means roughly “white roof” or “white house” in Azerbaijani. Founded in the mid-eighteenth century by Panah Ali Khan Javanshir and granted city status in 1828 after the Russian conquest, it grew into a substantial town — the 1989 Soviet census recorded 28,031 inhabitants, nearly all of them Azerbaijanis — serving the surrounding agricultural district with markets, schools, butter, wine and brandy factories, and the landmark Juma (Friday) Mosque built in 1868 to designs by architect Karbalayi Safikhan Karabakhi.
During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenian forces captured Aghdam at the Battle of Aghdam on July 23, 1993, and the city’s entire population fled. What followed was not destruction by battle but destruction by abandonment and plunder: over years of occupation the empty city was systematically stripped, its buildings dismantled for bricks, timber, metal, and stone, until only ruins remained. The devastation was so total that Aghdam became known as the “Hiroshima of the Caucasus,” with the surviving mosque standing almost alone amid a field of rubble.
For more than a quarter of a century Aghdam lay within territory controlled by the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, a ghost city in a buffer zone. Its mosque, one of the few structures left standing, was reportedly used during the occupation to keep cattle and pigs — a desecration that became a symbol of the conflict’s bitterness. The displaced residents of Aghdam joined the broader population of internally displaced Azerbaijanis who waited decades for a return.
Under the ceasefire that ended the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, the Aghdam District was handed back to Azerbaijan on November 20, 2020. Azerbaijan has since begun an ambitious reconstruction, restoring the Juma Mosque, opening the area to visitors, and launching plans to rebuild Aghdam as a modern “smart city” with new industrial and residential development — a return that, however, cannot instantly restore the community scattered nearly three decades earlier.
Tyneham was a small farming and estate village tucked into a valley running down to Worbarrow Bay on Dorset’s Isle of Purbeck — a place so old it appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ‘Tigeham.’ For centuries it was a quiet community of stone cottages, a Tudor-era manor house, a church with Saxon origins and a one-room schoolhouse, the whole of it owned and shaped by the Bond family of Tyneham House. On the eve of the Second World War it held roughly 225 people across about 100 dwellings, its rhythms set by farming, fishing off Worbarrow and the church bell.
In late 1943 that world ended. With Allied forces preparing for the Normandy invasion and the existing Lulworth gunnery ranges proving too small for a new generation of tanks, the War Office issued a requisition notice on 16 November 1943 for Tyneham and some 7,500 surrounding acres of heath, downland and farmland, to be used for live-firing and armoured training. Residents were given roughly 28 days’ notice to leave, and the last families departed just before Christmas 1943. As they went, a villager pinned a now-famous note to the door of the parish church: ‘Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.’
They never did. The understanding of return was bound up in the wartime, temporary nature of the seizure, but once the war ended the Ministry of Defence found the coastal ranges too valuable to relinquish. In 1948 a compulsory purchase order made the requisition permanent, and the Bond family and former residents were barred for good. Campaigns to reopen the valley to settlement persisted for decades, but the strategic case for armoured gunnery on the relatively empty Purbeck coast always prevailed, and the broader Lulworth Ranges remain in active military use to this day.
Today Tyneham is one of England’s best-known ‘ghost villages’ — a roofless, ivy-laced shell of cottages preserved inside the active Lulworth military ranges, opened to the public on most weekends and holiday periods when firing is not scheduled. The church and the schoolhouse survive intact and have been restored as small museums, the school slates and desks laid out as if the children had just stepped out. Peter Wellman, the last surviving person born in the village, died in 2025 at the age of 100, having revisited Tyneham the year before. Tyneham stands as a monument both to wartime sacrifice and to a promise the state did not keep — a temporary measure that quietly became permanent.
On 10 June 1944 — four days after the Allied landings in Normandy — a company of the Waffen-SS from the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ murdered 642 people in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in the Haute-Vienne region of central France. The soldiers, drawn from the division’s ‘Der Führer’ regiment and led by Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann, sealed off the village, separated the men from the women and children, shot the men in barns and garages, and burned the women and children alive in the parish church. It remains the single deadliest Nazi massacre of civilians carried out on French soil.
The killing was carried out with grim method. The SS rounded up the entire population in the marketplace under the pretext of an identity check, marched the men to several barns where machine guns were waiting, and aimed at their legs before setting the buildings alight. The women and children — more than 400 of them — were locked inside the church, where an incendiary device was detonated; those who tried to flee through windows and doors were shot. Only a small handful of people survived: a few men who feigned death and crawled from the burning barns, and a single woman who escaped the church through a window. The Germans then looted and burned the rest of the village.
The reasons remain contested. The massacre occurred during savage anti-partisan operations as Das Reich moved north toward Normandy through a region of active French Resistance, and it has been linked to the abduction of a German officer, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, by the maquis. It is also widely thought the SS may have confused Oradour-sur-Glane with the nearby village of Oradour-sur-Vayres. Whatever the trigger, the victims had no demonstrated connection to any Resistance action, and the slaughter fit the Nazi doctrine of collective reprisal against civilians.
After the war, the French state made an extraordinary choice: rather than rebuild, it would preserve. Charles de Gaulle decreed that the burned village be left exactly as the SS had left it, and a new Oradour was constructed alongside the ruins. The rusted cars, scorched walls, and the sewing machines and prams of the dead still stand as the ‘village martyr,’ and in 1999 the Centre de la mémoire opened to interpret the site. The 1953 trial of surviving perpetrators in Bordeaux — complicated by the presence of Alsatian conscripts forced into the SS — and the cross-border reconciliation visit of 2013 made Oradour a permanent, visible warning across generations.