Four alabaster giants contemplate the tides on the shore of Denmark.

Seriously good slices of Sicilian pizza lurk at the back of the Bronx's oldest enclosed market.

This plot of old-growth forest is the largest surviving remnant of New York City's original woodland.

An uber-secure, windowless tower of doom in the center of Manhattan is an NSA spyscraper.

A remnant of the original World Trade Center complex continues to serve as a commuter gateway.

Unrepaired walls from a 1920 anarchist bomb attack.

Empty, but not abandoned, this cavernous Brooklyn loading dock was once considered the largest individual building in the world.

A library and shop devoted to the body, mortality, and bringing to light forgotten or neglected histories

A dictator's gold statue once rotated to face the sun on a 75-meter high marble tower.

The controversial final resting place of the equally controversial first president of Turkmenistan.

This famed Silk Road oasis was one of the largest cities in the world before it was destroyed by a Mongol horde.

Few people have ever heard of, let alone visited, one of Turkmenistan’s most impressive natural attractions.

A memorial to the thousands of Turkmen soldiers and civilians who died in a bloody 1881 battle.

This cavernous swimming spot doubles as a home to the largest known colony of bats in Central Asia.

A cemetery with goat-horn bedecked gravestones.

This harsh mountain path was built as a strange attempt to improve the health of Turkmen citizens.

If you want to get married in the White Marble City of Ashgabat, you should do it in this surreal disco ball building.

A huge monument to a bizarre book written by Turkmenistan’s longstanding dictator.

Sumptous memorial to a controversial independence.

A fiery crater has been burning in the Karakum Desert since 1971.

A massive relic of the communist era of Berlin.

This stunning concert hall has become a symbol of Iceland's national recovery.

The picturesque birthplace of Icelandic democracy is drenched in the blood of its brutal past.

If a glacial river suddenly diving into a sheer chasm via a dramatic, multi-stage waterfall isn't peak Iceland, it's certainly close.