What Is the Tartarian Empire Conspiracy Theory?

Background

The Tartarian Empire theory holds that a technologically and culturally advanced global civilisation called Tartaria once existed, built the ornate, elaborately decorated buildings found across many 19th- and early 20th-century cities, and was then deliberately erased from historical memory, its structures either demolished, misattributed to later architects, or buried by a catastrophic event proponents call the "mud flood." The claim draws its name from a real historical term: "Tartary" was used by European mapmakers and writers from the 13th to the 19th centuries to describe the vast, imperfectly understood regions of Central Asia and Siberia, home over that long period to numerous genuinely distinct peoples, khanates, and empires, never to a single unified advanced global civilisation of the kind the modern theory describes.

The modern theory's roots lie in Russian pseudohistory: mathematician Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology," developed from the mid-1970s into the 1980s, radically revised accepted historical timelines, and writer Nikolai Levashov later incorporated Tartaria into an explicitly racial and occult reworking of Russian history. Beginning around 2016, the claim spread widely across English-language internet forums and video platforms, detached almost entirely from its original Russian nationalist framing and reattached instead to a broader, internationally circulated "lost advanced civilisation" narrative.

Main Theories

The Tartarian Empire claim

Proponents cite specific real buildings as evidence: the demolished Singer Building and the original Pennsylvania Station in New York, structures built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and prominent surviving landmarks including the White House, arguing their elaborate ornamentation exceeds what conventional history credits 19th-century architects and builders with achieving. Proponents further argue that many old buildings' ground-floor windows and doorways, which sit below current street level in numerous cities, are evidence that a catastrophic "mud flood" buried an earlier civilisation's structures, sometimes adding a claim that Tartaria possessed unlimited wireless electrical power, a detail borrowing directly from popular Nikola Tesla mythology.

The architectural-history explanation

Historians and architectural critics identify straightforward, well-documented explanations for every specific claim. The buildings cited as "Tartarian" are real, attributed structures built in Beaux-Arts and related ornate historical revival styles that dominated grand public architecture across Europe and North America from the late 19th century into the early 20th, taught formally at Paris's École des Beaux-Arts and used deliberately by named, documented architects. World's fair buildings from this era were frequently temporary by design, built from staff, a plaster-like material intended to last only for an exposition's duration, which is why so many no longer stand, not because they were suppressed. The "sunken" ground floors proponents cite as flood evidence instead reflect a well-documented, mundane 19th-century urban engineering practice: cities including Chicago in the 1850s and 60s deliberately raised entire street grades by several feet to install modern sewer systems, paving over the old grade rather than excavating it, leaving earlier buildings' original ground floors below the new street level.

Common Misconceptions

It is sometimes assumed that historical maps labelled "Tartary" or "Tartaria" are themselves evidence for the modern claim. They are genuine primary sources, but they document exactly what cartographers of the period intended: a broad, imprecisely known geographic region inhabited by multiple distinct peoples, not a single unified advanced empire whose existence was later suppressed.

It is also sometimes assumed the theory is a purely modern internet phenomenon with no earlier history. Its core structure, a lost advanced civilisation erased from the historical record, predates its 2016-era online popularity by decades, tracing through Fomenko's revisionist chronology and Levashov's explicitly racial and occult framework, a lineage considerably more ideologically loaded than the theory's current, largely aesthetic online presentation acknowledges.

Current Consensus

Historians and architectural scholars reject the Tartarian Empire claim without serious dispute: every specific building cited as evidence has a documented architect, construction date, and stylistic context within real, well-studied architectural movements, and the "mud flood" mechanism has a mundane, extensively documented urban-engineering explanation unconnected to any lost civilisation. Architectural critic Zach Mortice has described the theory as reflecting genuine cultural discontent with modernist architecture rather than a serious historical claim, calling it "the QAnon of architecture" for its similarly crowdsourced, internet-native structure of reinterpreting real, disconnected artefacts into a single unifying secret narrative.

Why This Mystery Endures

The Tartarian Empire theory endures because its central evidence, buildings anyone can see photographs of, or visit in person, is unusually concrete and aesthetically compelling compared to more abstract conspiracy claims, giving it an immediate visual persuasiveness that a purely textual theory lacks. It also channels a genuine, widely shared aesthetic reaction, that modern architecture is comparatively plain against 19th-century ornamentation, into a historical claim, converting a preference for one architectural style over another into an allegation of suppression rather than simply changing taste, building costs, and construction methods.

The theory's structure closely mirrors older lost-civilisation claims this site covers: like Ignatius Donnelly's 1882 Atlantis and Graham Hancock's Ice Age lost-civilisation theory, it proposes a single advanced source civilisation erased by catastrophe, updated for an internet audience with architecture in place of megaliths. Its crowdsourced, internet-native spread from a single seed idea into a continuously reinterpreted community narrative also closely parallels QAnon, the comparison architectural critic Zach Mortice has drawn directly. The Tartarian Empire claim is part of this site's debunked myths coverage.