By Joe Smith
Once dubbed the biggest theme park in Europe and a “symbol of pride” for a nation, this theme park now sits abandoned after closing its doors after just one year of business.
Turkey’s Ankapark is a forlorn place today, with abandoned rides and decaying attractions where once there were crowds of happy thrillseekers. The massive park, boasting 1.3million square metres, opened in 2019 as Wonderland Eurasia, but within a year it was abandoned, with its dozen rollercoasters left lifeless and rusting.
During the park’s heyday, it was hailed as a national icon, with Turkish president Tayyip Erdoğan calling the venue "one of the symbols of pride for Turkey." Today however that symbol is sadly tarnished with rubbish and debris everywhere, and weeds reclaiming the attractions.
When it opened, the park was an international attraction, boasting 26 large theme park rides and a massive 2,117 smaller rides, all housed in 13 massive tent structures and a big outdoor space. Parking for a thousand cars was constructed, in anticipation of hordes of visitors, and the park even boasted a fountain that could shoot jets of water 120m into the air.
The park’s backers had estimated it would attract five million guests through the gates each year, but problems with construction, lawsuits and unpaid wages saw the park shut after less than a year.
The massive park, designed to be Turkey’s answer to Disneyland, cost £637million ($801m) to build but it didn’t take long after opening for problems to start cropping up. Just two days after the inauguration a roller coaster broke down, public bathrooms were in a terrible state and multiple rides were not finished.
Large areas of the park were off-limits to the public as building works there had not been finished in time and just a year down the line Ankapark closed down. Operators struggled to pay wages and foot the electricity bill.
Today broken toys and parts of doomed rides litter the site, which sits in an eerie quiet. The empty park has become a target for thieves who try to steal cables and other equipment from the trashed rides.
The park was first announced by Ankara’s mayor Melih Gokcek in 2013, but the scheme was dogged by legal issues and accusations of cprruption and political scandal from the early days. His successor, mayor Mansur Yavas blamed the collapse of Turkey’s version of Disneyland on Gokcek and filed several criminal complaints against Gokcek for negligence and abuse of office.
Turkish politician and close associate of Yavas, Meral Aksener, gave a damning indictment of the scandals leading up to the park’s collapse, saying: “Ankapark is the concrete version of all the corruption and waste that has been carried out in Turkey to date."
In the end, the ruined theme park is a far cry from the beacon of pride that Ankapark had been designed to be for Turkey.
