My favourite of the ancient wonders of the world, probably because I like plants and stuff. Rather frustratingly, it is the least understood and closer to a legend than a collapsed archeological site like most of the others. No official ruins have been found of the gardens anywhere, no mention of the gardens are found in official Babylonian texts and many archaeologists think they may not have even existed at all. Now they were mentioned in multiple Greek and Roman texts and even associated the gardens to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, so I am sure they were real.

The gardens may very well have been located in the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, modern day Mosul in northern Iraq. This theory exists due to terraced gardens and cool advanced ancient irrigation matching the description of the hanging gardens being mentioned in ancient Assyrian texts, instead attributed to the Assyrian King Sennacherib. The landscapes around Nineveh were, and still are, more on the luscious and fertile side than the deserted south where Babylon was located. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the day when they will make a miraculous discovery in Babylon just like they finally did with ancient Troy. Either way, whichever ancient king commissioned these legendary gardens, you should go and see Babylon and use some imagination.

Getting to Iraq was surprisingly easy as a UK national at the time I went (March 2024), I literally turned up and got an 80USD visa on arrival at the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. After some time in Basra, I got the night train to Baghdad and arranged a tour from there to visit Babylon and a few other amazing sights around. Using a local tour guide is definitely the way to explore Babylon, and I wrote all about this in my solo travel through Iraq blog post so check that out for all the info. I even hit up Mosul, ancient Nineveh, so you can cover all of your Ancient Garden location bases! The site of Babylon is really incredible, you have the unrestored sections, the restored sections of Saddam Hussein, and even Saddam’s palace overlooking the site and the Euphrates river which you can have a mooch around.

Once I moved to Turkey, suddenly my potential travel list exploded. Turkey is very easy and safe to explore, and it’s a huge country with so much to offer any kind of traveller, and i’ll write as many blog posts on my hidden gem experiences here as possible. Coming to the ancient wonders of the world, as with Egypt and Greece, Turkey is home to two of them! They are both also relatively easy to visit, and by that I mean they are not in the middle of nowhere, but of course if you are on holiday in Antalya for 1 week then you’d have to be quite dedicated to see them both.

A huge amount of tourists to Turkey visit the ancient site of Ephesus, though, with most not even knowing about the Temple of Artemis right around the corner. My first bus tour of Ephesus was from Marmaris and it luckily included a stop in the local town of Selçuk, which is home to the Temple of Artemis and the Ayasuluk Citadel / Selçuk Kalesi. Both of these are located in the north west of the town, with the main Ephasus complex located a 5 minute drive away to the south west. The Temple of Artemis can be seen on the map in Turkish as “Artemis Tapınağı”.

The Temple of Artemis was built around 550 BCE, and sadly was burned via arson in 356 BCE, destroyed by Goths in 262 BCE, and then dismantled for building other things over the following years. Due to all of these reasons, even the archaeological site is quite frustratingly bare.

Even though it is basically one column with a birds nest on the top, it is a really nice tranquil site with a good backdrop, and nice to know you are standing where the enormous temple once stood. The temple itself was supposedly absolutely massive, over 100m long and over 50m wide, which is over triple the size of the Greek Parthenon, which is already pretty big. It’s hard to imagine something of such scale in the ancient world, hence its captivation by ancient scholars.

The ancient colossal ivory and gold seated statue of Zeus, built around 435 BCE, sat at around 12m tall. The statue was built in the Ancient Greek city of Olympia, indeed home to the Olympic Games, a city dedicated to the king of gods, Zeus. Fitting for this legendary wonder which lasted around 1000 years, its demise is a mystery. There are theories that it was relocated to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and burned down in a fire. Others theorise that it was destroyed in an earthquake or simply dismantled. Whatever happened to this ancient wonder, you can still visit the archaeological site of Olympia today, on the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece.

Alas, this is the only one of the ancient wonders that I have not been to yet, so I will have to update this section when I get a chance to go. As much as the famous site itself must be amazing to visit, it doesn’t seem like there is much to miss out on in terms of the Statue of Zeus – perhaps they have some nice artist impressions and models though!

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, also known as the Tomb of Mausolus, was built around 350 BCE for Mausolus, an Anatolian king and ruler of Caria and his wife Artemisia. It is King Mausolus whose name is where we get the word mausoleum from, as it was such a grand structure that the Romans even named any fancy tomb after him. So Halicarnassus was the name of the Ancient Greek city in Caria which is now modern day Bodrum in Turkey, and the Mausoleum ruins are literally right in the centre of it.

The archaeological site is small but nice, with plenty of the original columns and blocks in the rectangular plan. Inside there is plenty of information about the wonder, as well as models of what it should have looked like. A fabulous 45m high stepped structure, featuring dramatic columns and sculptures, topped with a chariot. The mausoleum stood around 1500 years, while getting hit by earthquakes in the 13th and 15th centuries. This makes the mausoleum the last of the six fallen wonders to fall.

Most of the remaining structure was then dismantled and reused by the Knights of St. John to build the nearby Bodrum Castle from 1402 to defend against the Ottomans. Bodrum Castle is well worth a visit on its own, but especially as it’s mostly built from a wonder of the ancient world.

The archaeological site is only a 5 minute walk away from the beach, so if you’re in Bodrum it is absolutely worth a look. Bodrum and its surroundings are one of my favourite parts of Turkey, with white washed houses running down the rocky hills to the long beaches, contrasted by the bright pink bougainvilleas everywhere, overlooking the Mediterranean.

Below are some of my favourite pictures from Bodrum, and the hotel which I stay in each time I return – Manastir Hotel and Suites Bodrum. I stayed here by chance when I first visited Bodrum during my first summer in Turkey, and just fell in love with it and the incredible views it provides, as it sits atop a hill just 5 minutes from the beach. In the background of the final picture you can see Bodrum Castle jutting out into the Mediterranean, where most of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus now lays.

This demise of the tomb leads to a great question, where is King Mausolus and his wife buried if the tomb was removed? Well, nobody knows, but supposedly while the Knights of St. John were dismantling the structure, the coffins went missing. Alas, King Mausolus and his wife were probably grave robbed.

Constructed in around 280 BCE and standing at about 33m tall, the Colossus of Rhodes towered over the entrance to the harbour of the ancient Greek City of Rhodes, on the island of the same name. The statue was of the Ancient Greek sun god Helios, and was built by legendary sculptor Chares of Lindos (Lindos being another Ancient Greek city on the island) to celebrate victory from invading Macedonians under Alexander the Great – and what better way to celebrate this than a huge straddling bronze god statue. The colossus was made of bronze, with iron and stone for reinforcement and weighting respectively. Rather “unlegendarily”, with the ancient descriptions that we have, it would apparently have been impossible that the statue could have straddled the harbour, so it was probably just standing on one side. However, even as an engineer I will forever refuse to believe this technicality and assume that the ancients figured out a way and continue to live my Braavos harbour entrance dreams.

As with many other ancient sites, it was an earthquake that took out the colossus. In only around 225 BCE the statue fell, standing for a mere 55 years, the shortest lived of the ancient wonders. Yet, the rubble of the wonder was left in place until 654 CE – a staggering 879 years, 16 times the lifespan of the colossus itself. It was at this time when Rhodes was invaded by Arabian forces and the bronze was broken up and sold on, apparently 900 camels worth of ancient wonder goodness!

The city of Rhodes is a stunning place to visit today, with its Medieval old town built by the Knights of St. John, who established the Hospitaller Rhodes on the island for over 200 years from the 1300s to the 1500s, before eventually relocating to Malta. The harbour of Rhodes today has two commemorative columns on each side built in 1947, one with a Stag statue and the other with a Doe, showing where the Colossus of Rhodes may have straddled. The deer statues are from the legend that the Knights of St. John brought deer to the island to help get rid of the snakes apparently. Behind the columns is the Saint Nicholas Fortress, a medieval bastion built by the Knights of St. John to protect the harbour, and is currently a lighthouse.

The final and most recently constructed of the ancient wonders was the Lighthouse of Alexandria, completed in the very recent year of 246 BCE. The lighthouse is also known as the Pharos of Alexandria, as it was built on the island of Pharos in the Nile Delta, which was eventually connected to the mainland via a causeway. After Alexander the Great’s conquests, many cities called Alexandria popped up from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, however this was the Alexandria in Egypt which he founded opposite the small island of Pharos. The lighthouse was constructed by the Ptolemaic Kingdom after Alexander the Great died and Ptolemy the First declared himself king, of course.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria stood over 100m tall, eventually falling due to, you guessed it, earthquakes. It heroically withstood two major earthquakes and stood strong, however finally in 956 CE it collapsed. Some repairs and additions were made after this, but an even bigger earthquake completely destroyed the lighthouse in 1303. The remains were sat in the bay of Alexandria until 1480 when they were used to build the nearby Citadel of Qaitbat by the then sultan of Egypt under the Ayyubids. Providing light for ships via a furnace in the top for over 1200 years, this remarkable structure was also one of the most recently surviving of the Ancient Wonders of the World, only outlived by Mausolus’s Mausoleum, and of course the Great Pyramid.

Despite the multiple collapses, you can still see where the island of Pharos and the Lighthouse once stood, now marked by a column at the end of the bay entrance causeway. This causeway juts out from the Citadel of Qaitbay, which is a beautiful citadel. It is extremely well preserved, and you get a brilliant view of not only the lighthouse location, but the Mediterranean views from the lighthouse, Alexandre the Great and the Ptolemy’s themselves.

Alexander as a city completely exceeded my expectations. As Egypt’s second largest city, you can get there from Cairo easily on the train which is definitely the way to travel there. From Cairo train station you have to go upstairs to the tourist ticket office and you’ll get a 1st class tourist ticket to Alexandria, at least that seemed to be the only option for me when I asked around at the outside ticket offices. The train is in good condition, spacious and the views of the nile and countryside on the way send you right back to Ancient Egypt.

The coastline in Alexandria is really staggering, the city just sprawls along the sea for seemingly miles and miles and never ends. The sunsets are also incredible, especially around Stanley Bridge and the citadel. Worth visiting is the ancient Roman archaeological site and of course the Library of Alexandria – opened in 2002 it’s a homage and testament to the famous ancient Library of Alexandria. It is a truly incredible building and complex; architecturally, historically and educationally.