The Phantom Empire : How Tartaria Reveals the Secret Dreams of Our Age

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There is, first, this image : Vladimir Putin facing Tucker Carlson in that Kremlin office where we glimpse flags decorated with griffins, evoking with troubling precision the Golden Horde, that thirteenth-century Mongol empire that dominated the Russian steppes. The interview dates from February 2024. Putin speaks of history with that particular confidence of powerful men who rewrite the past to justify the present. Behind him, heraldic symbols shimmer under the lights. This scene, seemingly innocuous, reveals something essential about our time : how alternative myths become geopolitical weapons.

For while the Russian president mobilizes historical references before American cameras, in the algorithms of TikTok and the forums of Reddit, another version of this story is being written. It’s called Greater Tartaria, and it obsesses millions of internet users convinced that a world empire has been erased from our memories. On TikTok, the hashtag #tartaria accumulates three hundred million views. On Reddit, forty-three thousand members scrutinize every architectural detail, every urban anomaly, to reconstruct traces of this supposedly vanished civilization.

I wanted to understand how we had arrived here. How a conspiracy theory born in Russian nationalist circles of the 1980s had become one of the most fertile myths of our digital age. And above all, what this fascination revealed about ourselves, about our anxieties facing modernity, about our thirst for living architectures and harmonious technologies.

The story begins in post-Soviet Russia, in Anatoly Fomenko’s office. He’s a respected mathematician at Moscow University, a specialist in differential geometry. But in the 1980s, Fomenko develops an obsession that will change his life : the idea that conventional history is a vast mystification. He baptizes his theory "New Chronology." According to him, events attributed to Greek, Roman, or Egyptian antiquity actually took place during the Middle Ages, a thousand years later than what textbooks teach.

This radical rewriting finds fertile ground in the Soviet collapse. After 1991, part of Russian society searches for new identity narratives. Communist mythology crumbled with the Berlin Wall. What remains to nourish national pride ? Fomenko proposes a seductive alternative : making Russia the direct heir of a grandiose Eurasian empire, "Greater Tartaria," deliberately hidden by a jealous West.

Nikolai Levashov enriches this matrix with occultist elements. In his writings, Tartaria becomes a civilization of superhumans with prodigious technological capabilities, annihilated by dark forces. These theories find an audience in Russia, where they respond to a need for wounded grandeur. But it’s with the internet that everything changes.

Around 2016, Tartarian theories migrate toward anglophone platforms. The process fascinates : by detaching from their Russian nationalist matrix, they undergo a remarkable creative mutation. The new adherents, mostly Western, freely reinterpret the myth according to their own obsessions. I observe this phenomenon from my screens. On YouTube, specialized channels accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers proposing "investigations" into Tartarian architecture. The algorithms amplify everything. A thirty-second video suffices to transform the perception of a familiar monument : New York’s courthouse suddenly becomes a mysterious Tartarian vestige, its partially buried windows "proof" of a historical mud flood.

This aesthetic of the fragment, characteristic of social media, favors an impressionist approach where the accumulation of visual clues replaces rational analysis. Unlike centralized conspiracy theories, modern Tartaria functions as an open narrative where anyone can contribute. This collaborative dimension transforms passive consumption into active engagement.

Faced with this deluge, the academic response doesn’t delay. The Russian Geographical Society itself methodically dismantles Tartarian claims. It reminds us that the "Tartaria" of ancient maps was merely a European geographical designation for the vast Eurasian steppes. This region never constituted a unified empire.

Examination of cartographic sources confirms this reality. Abraham Ortelius’s sixteenth-century maps, often cited as "proof," actually reveal the rudimentary state of European geographical knowledge. The vast spaces marked "Tartaria" correspond to poorly known zones where nomadic peoples wandered. Far from designating a structured kingdom, these appellations translate European ignorance about eastern frontiers. Architectural analysis equally effectively dismantles Tartarian pretensions. Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, often cited as impossible to build with period techniques, perfectly illustrates the capabilities of nineteenth-century Russian engineering. The famous "mud flood," supposed to explain buried buildings, finds prosaic explanations in normal urban evolution.

Yet this scientific deconstruction struggles to stem the myth’s appeal. For adherents don’t function according to empirical validation logic. They develop what we might call a poetics of error, where narrative beauty takes precedence over veracity. This resistance reveals the phenomenon’s true nature : modern Tartaria belongs to mythology, not history.

It activates archetypes deeply anchored in human imagination. The lost golden age, the purifying catastrophe, forgotten wisdom, civilizing giants : all these motifs traverse cultures, from the myth of Atlantis to Arthurian legends. Tartarian theory reactualizes them in a contemporary technological context. It proposes a modern version of paradise lost, where technology liberates instead of alienating, where architecture unites instead of compartmentalizing, where energy heals instead of polluting. In a world confronting ecological crisis, the fantasy of Tartarian "free energy" offers compensatory release. Psychosociological analysis reveals other springs. Zach Mortice, architect and journalist, identifies in Tartarian passion a form of rejection of architectural modernism. Adherents systematically privilege ornate styles over modern architecture, judged dehumanizing. This aesthetic reveals nostalgia for a world where beauty and functionality weren’t dissociated.

Beyond its conspiracist aspects, the phenomenon functions as a revealer of contemporary anxieties. Its popularity coincides with a generalized crisis of confidence toward institutions. Proposing an "alternative history" responds to a psychological need : regaining control over a collective narrative perceived as externally imposed.

This political dimension shouldn’t be underestimated. When Putin evokes the Golden Horde facing Tucker Carlson, with this carefully orchestrated staging of symbols, he mobilizes exactly this same narrative matrix. Some content reinterprets Ukraine’s invasion as a "reconquest" of legitimate Tartarian territories. This instrumentalization illustrates the dangers of any pseudohistorical rewriting.

But analysis cannot stop at problematic dimensions. For modern Tartaria generates remarkable artistic creativity. It inspires a new visual grammar influencing contemporary art, video game design, speculative architecture. This "Tartaro-steampunk" aesthetic mixes retrofuturist codes with unprecedented technological mysticism.

Artists appropriate this universe to explore pressing contemporary questions. How to imagine sustainable technologies ? Can we conceive architectures that heal ? The Tartarian fantasy, with its etheric machines and energetic cities, offers experimental terrain.

This creative fertility appears in the video game universe, where several studios develop projects inspired by Tartarian aesthetics. These works allow concrete exploration of alternative technology implications, testing utopian social models. The ludic medium transforms pseudohistorical speculation into prospective laboratory.

Experimental architecture seizes these visual codes. Conceptual projects integrate "Tartarian" elements—energetic domes, functional ornamentations—to propose alternatives to industrial architecture. These explorations enrich contemporary architectural vocabulary. The "New Weird" artistic movement finds rich inspiration in the Tartarian universe. The theory’s impossible landscapes—mountain-trees, canyon-roots, mesa-stumps—offer a repertoire of surrealist images questioning our geological perception.

This creative appropriation reveals an unexpected function : the myth serves as an imaginary "toolkit" for thinking differently about our relationship to the world. Its fantastic technologies stimulate reflection on renewable energies, its organic architectures inspire eco-construction. Analysis of the phenomenon ultimately reveals less about a fantasmatic empire than about ourselves. This "collective waking dream" functions as a projective test where our frustrations and hopes express themselves.

First, it reveals our nostalgia for a world where technology and harmony weren’t antithetical. Facing industrialization’s damage, the fantasy of "free energy" expresses our thirst for non-destructive solutions. This technological utopia points toward a real need : reconciling technical progress and environmental respect.

Passion for Tartarian architecture translates our malaise facing urban standardization. Praise of ornate styles reveals aspiration to architectural beauty, too often sacrificed to economic imperatives. More profoundly, the myth’s success signals a crisis of Western collective narrative. In an epoch of cultural fragmentation, proposing an "alternative history" responds to an anthropological need : giving meaning to common experience.

The geopolitical dimension illustrates contemporary stakes of narrative "soft power." In a multipolar world, the capacity to propose alternative narratives becomes a power instrument. Tartarian theory diffusion participates in a strategy of destabilizing Western consensus. Study reveals the urgency of critical education adapted to the digital era. Algorithmic mechanisms, visual content virality create unprecedented conditions for pseudo-knowledge diffusion. Simple factual refutation no longer suffices.

Paradoxically, analysis suggests constructive paths. Its capacity to generate new imaginaries shows it’s possible to positively channel the utopian energy it conveys. Rather than denouncing its problematic aspects, society could draw inspiration from its creative fertility.

In a world confronting major challenges, we need new mobilizing narratives associating scientific rigor and imaginative power. The Tartarian myth’s success demonstrates public appetite for such narrations. For fundamentally, the question modern Tartaria poses isn’t "did this empire exist ?" but "what world do we want to build ?" In its impossible architectures, the contours of our true civilizational aspirations take shape. It’s up to us to decipher them and translate them into concrete projects.

When I think back to that image of Putin evoking the Golden Horde, I tell myself we’re perhaps witnessing something larger than simple geopolitical manipulation. We’re witnessing the renaissance of myths as power instruments, their resurgence in a world that has lost its great unifying narratives. Tartaria, in its Russian version as in its globalized version, reveals our thirst for meaning, our need for transcendence, our nostalgia for a time when humanity and its technology were one. This should worry us, of course. But it should also inspire us.