Places WanderlustDiaries Wants to Go

A Lycian city of the dead carved into the hillside of Southern Turkey, complete with startlingly human touches.

These tombs were built into the side of a mountain so that ancient angels could reach the dead.

Roman ruins top white travertine terraces formed by ancient hot springs.

A boiling wellspring flowing with natural gas burns in a continual blaze.

The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq until ISIS blew it up twice and then drove over it with bulldozers.

This former monument to an invented Iraqi victory was turned into a military camp during the subsequent invasion.

This ancient stone bridge is a hub for daredevils.

A bloody history is captured in this former prison turned museum.

A 2200 year old vessel may have been able to keep a charge.

This remnant of an ancient Persian city is considered to be the world's largest single-span brick vault arch.

An ancient sanctuary that has long been a holy site for the Chaldean Christian Church.

A giant bisected onion dome remembers the Iraqis who died in the Iran-Iraq War.

The surviving pieces of an ancient aqueduct that may have fed into the lost Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Giant reed houses made in the marshes of Southern Iraq.

Ancient rock-cut tomb? Definitely. That of a great Median king? Unlikely.

A shrine on the shores of the Tigris.

A 605-page Quran penned in the blood of a dictator is locked away in a mosque.

This beautiful arched gate is all that remains of the fortress the ancient mountaintop town of Amadiya once was.

An ancient fortified mound raised over the millennia from settlements built one on top of the other.

The sacred shrine of the Yazidis.

9th century Abbasid mosque, damaged in modern warfare.

Celebrated as a center of civilization, the remains of the ancient city have been nearly destroyed by greed, egoism, and war.

The 20th-century archaeologist was interred among the ruins of an ancient Roman city.

A ghost village sits atop a mountain within Jordan’s largest biosphere reserve.