The Tartaria Hypothesis: What Is the Evidence and Where Does It Fail?

Evidence for

• European cartographers from Ortelius (1570 'Theatrum Orbis Terrarum') through the 18th century consistently labeled a vast region stretching from the Caspian to the Pacific as 'Tartaria' or 'Grand Tartary,' confirming that the name was geographically real and widely recognized, giving the hypothesis its initial plausibility hook.
• Certain 19th-century public buildings in American and European cities—including courthouses, train stations, and post offices—display architectural sophistication (ornate stonework, precise column spacing, load-bearing domes) that Tartaria proponents argue is disproportionate to the documented labor and capital available to frontier or newly settled communities, a question architectural historian researcher Christopher Jon Bjerknes and independent researcher Jon Levi have pressed in video archives since roughly 2017.
• The 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition 'White City' is a recurring exhibit in Tartaria discourse: the neoclassical plaster-of-Paris structures were demolished almost immediately after the fair, which proponents read as suspicious erasure, though documentary evidence of deliberate demolition and fire is well-preserved in the Chicago History Museum archive.
• The existence of so-called 'sunken' ground floors in older urban buildings—windows at or below street grade—is cited as physical evidence of a mud-flood event burying older street levels; this phenomenon is genuine in some cities (notably Edinburgh's 'Real Mary King's Close,' documented since at least the 17th century) but has a mundane explanation in deliberate infill and raised road grades over decades.
• Researcher Sylvie Ivanowa ('NewEarth' YouTube channel, active 2016–present) has compiled cross-cultural architectural parallels—domed public buildings on multiple continents using similar decorative grammar—arguing they point to a single pre-modern global culture, a claim that, while overstated, does touch on the real historical phenomenon of Beaux-Arts internationalism and shared pattern books circulating after 1750.
• Genuine suppressed or minimized historical catastrophes—the Tunguska event (1908), the 1811–1812 New Madrid earthquakes, and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis championed by Randall Carlson and the Comet Research Group—lend credibility to the general idea that catastrophic civilizational resets are possible, even if none of these events map onto Tartaria's specific claims.