Original subtitles

Narrator: A beautiful French chateau with a grim past.

This castle's glory was born out of deceit and treachery.

In Kansas City, america,

a gloomy looking structure once a beacon of hope.

It was a remedy to the racial injustices that were going on.

An isolated settlement off the coast of Ireland.

There was no local doctor, there was no priest

and the government even refused to install a telephone line.

And an out of this world site in Turkey built by sheer ingenuity.

A lot of resources were spent to create these beautiful spaces,

hundreds of feet above ground.

Decaying relics...

..Shadows of lost worlds.

Ruins haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

In the heart of France's loire valley,

to the south west of Paris

is a fairy-tale structure with a dramatic story to tell.

I feel like I've been sat down in the middle of the magic kingdom.

It's beautiful and utterly captivating,

it's like this mix between ankur watts and Disneyland.

This region is known for it's sprawling chateaus.

But none look quite like this.

It's not the standard version,

most of them are very, very symmetrical.

This one is fun, it sits in the middle of a lake,

a deliberate lake

and it makes the castle look like it's floating,

it's a really clever architectural trick.

Yet the days of grandeur are now a distant memory.

The roof's gone

and there's vegetation crawling it's way through all the windows

and along all the walls.

But behind this glorious chateau is a tale of treachery and deceit.

It's owner was labelled a traitor by France's most notorious king.

But his fall from grace was the making of this fantastical place.

The loire valley is famed for it's extravagant castles.

Centuries of aristocratic wealth

meant that opulence was the norm here.

Here we are in the garden of France, the climate is perfect,

it's not too dry, it's not too wet,

it's this wonderful lush kind of setting.

Why not have a chateau here,

indeed, why not have many chateau's here?

(Speaks in French)

When romain delaume first came here in 2017

he was instantly struck by the majestic charm

of the run down ruin.

Chateau de la mothe-chandeniers

dates back to the 13th century,

a time when powerful kings and queens ruled the land

and long before the horrors of a bloody revolution.

(Speaks in French)

Over the years the chateau has changed hands many times

and so has it's appearance.

It's most notorious owner was francois de la rochechouart.

He's one of the you know,

great nobles of the 17th century in France.

Quite close to king Louis the 13th, the father of Louis the 14th

and thick as thieves with the ruling elite in France at the time.

Francois is captain of the king's bodyguards

so he's responsible for the royal family's safety

and protection.

But at the start of 1643

the sudden death of the king sent shockwaves across France.

The death of Louis the 13th brings about great political unrest,

they're in the middle of the Franco Spanish war

and a change in leadership at this moment

is absolutely catastrophic, turns politics in to turmoil.

The new king, Louis the 14th, was just four years old

so his mother and her advisors took control.

They soon raised taxes

to cover the escalating cost of the ongoing war with Spain.

This provokes an uprising in France of the leading noble families,

the merchant class

and even just ordinary people in the big cities like Paris

against the regime, rebelling against these tax demands.

1648 marks the start of a series of small civil wars

collectively known as the frond.

And during the frond, rochechouart falls under suspicion

of agitating against Louis the 14th

and so he's imprisoned by order of the king for two years.

When he was finally released francois de rochechouart

now exiled from Louis' royal court in Paris

retreated to his family's dilapidated castle here in the loire valley.

Originally built as a hunting lodge,

fortress, it's been pretty much disused for two centuries

but he sets about transforming it in to a renaissance palace.

And to make up for his dramatic fall from grace,

he creates his own court to overshadow the king's.

(Speaks in French)

Extravagance and indulgence were the order of the day.

Everything here is designed for hosting.

"Come, come experience this place, here is your room,

"here's the ballroom

"and join us this evening for this amazing party."

It's all about building alliances through hosting and fun.

This was a very decadent period for the nobility.

At the time they'd certainly never heard of the saying less is more.

This life of luxury had a high price,

one that the out of favour de rochechouart

could actually ill afford.

(Speaks in French)

Sadly after it's initial moment of glory

the castle moves through different sets of hands

and gradually falls in to disrepair.

The chateau was left to rot for another 140 years.

(Speaks in French)

Inspired by the romanticism

of the most beautiful castles of the loire,

they transformed the chateau once again.

But in the end a tragic event led to the destruction

from which it would never recover.

A devastating fire in 1932 broke out from a new boiler,

destroying huge parts of the chateau.

(Speaks in French)

The next chapter of the fairy tale castle is only just beginning.

When romain first came here the ruin was scheduled for demolition.

He had 80 days to save it.

(Speaks in French)

40,000 people from all over the world invested in the rescue project.

Now the chateau's doors are open once again.

(Speaks in French)

You can imagine francois would be pretty pleased

to know that there's that level of interest in his pet project.

In central Turkey

is a peculiar looking cliff side

full of strange shapes

and striking rock formations.

This place looks almost like an alien landscape,

you have these towers of rock,

you have areas that look almost like sand dunes

with holes in them,

it's a really bizarre other worldly landscape.

When you get closer

you realise you can actually get inside these caves,

they were put there deliberately

and there's little signs of civilisation.

So these caves were intentionally built

hundreds of feet off the ground.

Some caves hold clues about their purpose

and several have their stories painted on the walls.

People clearly put a vast amount of time and skill

in to beautifying and decorating these places

even though they really are in the middle of nowhere.

We're in modern day Turkey which has an incredibly long history

but also a major impact on the world.

This is a parched land, very dry, very hot,

you have to be really determined if you want to live here.

(Speaks in Turkish)

For the past 20 years

mehmet ekiz has been documenting the rich history here.

(Speaks in Turkish)

Dwellings like these were dug in to the rock out of fear.

The caves were simple.

Small shelves provide places to sleep.

And one room was dedicated to a new religion.

(Speaks in Turkish)

When these structures were built,

they were part of the enormous Roman empire.

In the second century

the Roman empire stretched from britain to the persian Gulf.

The new religion of christianity was outlawed.

If you were caught by a Roman soldier

speaking about your god and his son Jesus

you could be forced upon pain of death to renounce your religion,

you could be arrested,

we've all heard stories about christians being fed to the lions.

As a result of this brutal treatment,

christians made their way to the furthest reaches of the Roman empire

but even there they weren't safe.

(Speaks in Turkish)

If the romans had found a Christian church like this

in the 2nd century

they would have raised it to the ground

and they would have had all the christians inside executed.

But this particular church

was built by none other than the romans themselves.

Christianity became more and more mainstream,

by the 4th century for the first time

a Roman emperor, constantine, converted to christianity.

The legend says that constantine was baptised on his death bed,

soon afterwards christianity was made legal in the Roman empire.

(Speaks in Turkish)

Suddenly the christians in cappadocia could come out of hiding,

they didn't have to worry about the Roman soldiers anymore,

they could re-join the rest of Roman society.

But cappadocia wasn't abandoned.

Instead they dug further in to the rock.

(Speaks in Turkish)

Much of Roman cappadocia has been damaged or looted

but one church has been preserved.

Guano formed a hard amour over elaborate frescos

preserving them almost as they were more than 1,000 years ago.

You can see that they spent a lot of resources on the church,

they used expensive blue pigment in the painting and even real gold.

After a couple of centuries of repression

this was a golden age for christianity.

But 300 years after Rome made peace with christianity,

cappadocia came under attack again, but this time from a new direction.

The new force was the conquering Muslim empire

which had expanded out of Arabia in all directions.

For 300 years, cappadocia was caught in a battle between east and west.

During the invasion the christians went back underground,

some of them literally dug an underground city

but that's another story.

In the 11th century

an army from a Muslim people called the seldjuks

marched in to cappadocia.

When the Muslim armies arrived

there was tension and conflict initially

but the christians weren't wiped out

and over time the two peoples grew and lived together in this region.

(Speaks in Turkish)

For the next 800 years,

christians and muslims lived here peacefully

but in 1915 cappadocian christians faced persecution again.

In the early 20th century the Turkish government

under took a murderous campaign of eradication against christians,

today we call it the Armenian genocide,

it targeted Greeks and Armenians

both of which were largely Christian groups.

Many, many thousands of Greeks and Armenians

were forcibly deported from the area and most of them were christians,

there were also accounts of up to 750,000 people

being massacred

but that has always been denied by the Turkish government.

The Armenian genocide marked the end of a 1,600 year old story,

no christians have lived in the caves of cappadocia ever since.

These dwellings were still in use

several decades in to the 20th century.

But in the 1960s two people were killed by falling rocks

and the rest of the residents were moved.

Today cappadocia is a unesco world heritage site,

600 churches have now been documented

with many more still waiting to be discovered.

In Kansas City, Missouri, usa,

a stone building stands apart from the Metropolis.

This place sits just on the outskirts of the city

and you wouldn't necessarily tell

that something important happened here.

Most of the windows are boarded up,

if you happen to be able to look inside

you see the stripped rooms,

it's clearly been abandoned for some time.

Inside the building has been striped bear

but some clues hint at its history.

Everything's been emptied out,

there are places where equipment used to be.

The architecture's very basic,

there are no frills here

and usually that might suggest a government building

or a place that was built in a hurry for a desperate need.

Without this building many of the cities' residents

would die unnecessarily.

Historian Gerry Sanders

spent more than five years piecing together the puzzle here.

To her frustration she hasn't been able to go inside until now.

It's been closed for 30 years.

I can't even express to you how emotional I feel

about being inside this building for the first time.

But it just pains me that there is just so much, you know,

negativity on the walls that just says light it up,

like somebody wanted to burn down this place.

This was once at the centre of a community called 18th and vine,

it was known as the black mecca.

18th and vine is this historic district in Kansas City Missouri

and it's formed out of black migration,

from places in the south,

places in the midwest,

and by the early 1900s, it has this amazing music scene.

It's a place where jazz thrived

and drew more African Americans in to the community,

then black culture thrived and expanded there.

In many cases, places like 18th and vine,

places like the black section of Kansas City

really are places where black people could organise

and feel a little bit safer.

By the 1920s,

more than 30,000 African Americans

lived around 18th and vine.

But even Kansas City's black mecca

wasn't exempt from the notorious Jim crow laws.

It comes from an English actor

who used to play to a song called 'jump Jim crow'

and he would act in black face

and eventually that became the moniker for segregation.

African Americans were not allowed to integrate anything,

schools, churches and my favourite, cemeteries.

I mean like, what would a dead black person

be able to do to a dead white person?

Another segregated institution was healthcare.

Kansas City had only one hospital

for it's entire population of black people,

it was called general hospital two.

General hospital two was quite literally a hospital

that had served whites in Kansas City,

and was then left once white people got a new hospital

that was built for them.

It's in effect a cast off building

and black people received cast off care.

For every ten beds for white citizens,

there were just three for black people,

but by 1918, attitudes within 18th and vine were changing.

When the black soldiers came back from world war I,

there was this new attitude that they portrayed

and it was kind of talked about as being in the "new negro."

Around 200,000 African Americans were drafted and sent to fight in Europe.

With hundreds dying defending their country.

There was a new awareness

of how people were being treated,

the injustices, inequalities that were going on.

But while the so called new negro movement

was demanding political equality

and an end to segregation,

in Kansas City, sick black patients were going untreated,

the solution to the problem still stands on 18th and vine.

Erica Brice is restoring this 100-year-old building.

You see a lot of the original wood in here,

you see the newer beams and original beams.

So this is wood that is so solid,

like literally they do not make buildings like this anymore,

the cost of a building like this, I can't even imagine.

When you think you have boards

maybe 1901 well over a century and a quarter,

you know, over ago still rocking,

solid you know,

the floors that you see over there are all original too.

Kansas City had four hospitals for white citizens,

but the only facility for African Americans

was an abandoned formerly white only hospital.

One man decided he was going to do something about it,

his name was doctor Edward Perry.

Edward Perry is the son of former slaves,

he's born in Texas, he excels academically,

he attends meharry medical college

which is a black medical college in Nashville Tennessee

and he becomes a medical doctor.

Perry founded the wheatley provident hospital.

This hospital was really filling a void

for black residents of Kansas City, Missouri.

And it was really just a bandy at first,

it was a single two-storey building

that was providing care to people

who may not have received care at all

or who are receiving substandard care.

As I understand, a lot of these were medical rooms,

either examination rooms or rooms for patients,

and so this actually building

despite the condition it looks in right now,

this is the most solid part of our building or was.

This was not a cutting edge facility,

they were not operating

at the boundaries of modern science,

but what they did offer

was a capable and compassionate service with a bit of dignity.

Gerry Sanders has collected together stories

from former patients,

including one who was actually born in wheatley provident.

He said that his mother came from Saint Louis to give birth to him

because it was kind of looked upon really badly

that she was a young unwed mother,

so doctor Perry would accept all patients

regardless of colour and regardless of ability to pay.

The wheatley provident hospital

transformed the standard of medical care

for black people in Kansas City,

but the city's most needy patients still weren't being treated,

so the hospital commissioned the construction

of a second building.

Behind this is the original building

that was the hospital in 1918,

and we've now re-entered the side that was built in 1924

as part of the model children's ward.

In 1925, they built a whole new wing to take care of children's needs,

a paediatric wing.

They called it the mercy ward,

and the mercy ward was a major game changer,

not only in terms of offering paediatric care,

but also training for nurses and doctors.

And so we have a few photos,

we have seen some ads for some nurses

where they're looking for nurses,

and you'll see some children sitting on some beds and what not,

that was in this room,

and so you can kind of imagine kind of like a nursing station

back here probably some sinks or something like that and beds.

The remodelled hospital was also a shining example of social equality.

So you have two white women, doctors,

this is 1924, 1920s

right, early 1920s,

and you have two African American doctors

and you have this organisation that come together

to provide quality health care for all children.

That level of equality was revolutionary.

To see the humanity in each other

and work with each other like that,

that was actually pretty revolutionary.

And so what makes it so special to me.

For 50 years, wheatley provident hospital

took care of children and adults

in the African American community here.

But inevitably, it eventually reached full capacity.

Wheatley hospital could no longer accommodate

the number of patients that were coming in,

so in 1972,

they built Martin Luther King junior memorial hospital.

That same year, wheatley provident hospital closed its doors for good.

It may sound like a sad ending for wheatley provident

after it did so much for the community,

but it plastered over a major social injustice,

and when that injustice was corrected,

wheatley provident graciously retired.

Today, Erika Brice is helping

to restore the wheatley provident hospital

to make it the centre of 18th and vine once more.

And we do have some super strong visions

for what happens next,

but it's also critical to us

that this is also economic generator,

we don't wanna just be pretty to look at,

we want it to continue to be a functional source.

And for Erica, this is much more than simply a job.

This is not for the money,

there's a lot easier ways to make money,

you do this because you have a passion for preserving this asset,

and so my nieces and my nephews

and my family members to come and Kansas citizens to come,

can also participate in this building.

These institutions like wheatley provident

that were born out of segregation in many regards

where the activism done to dismantle segregation,

many of these institutions became temporary,

but they served a tremendous service.

These were institutions that served

a crying need and were game changers.

Off the west coast of Ireland,

a marooned outpost bears traces of a Hardy people.

You can look out to the sea

and in the distance, you see a rugged looking Ireland.

Out here you were completely alone with nothing but your face.

Dilapidated, weather worn buildings hug the landscape.

Roofs and walls are crumbling and collapsing in,

there's slate and timber all over the floor,

they're in complete disrepair,

and surely have not been lived in for many years.

There are few hints about what went on here.

A small defunct pier,

shows us some of the things

that the people must have done in their daily lives,

but it's out there with the ocean

and showing that every day danger that they must have faced as well.

But there was something much more mystical about this place.

If you look beneath the crumbling rocks,

you'll see centuries of history revealed.

But what was this place?

Was it an ancient Roman mining town?

Was it the remote fortress of some band of knights?

Was it the kingdom of some obscure Irish prince?

What tragedy left this tiny place deserted?

Situated five miles out in the Atlantic ocean,

this is inishark.

Getting to the island is difficult.

There's no natural harbour.

There's a pier there

that was badly damaged with storms

and never got any repairs done to it.

Local archaeologist Tommy Burke has been fascinated

by the islands ghostly houses since he first came here as a child.

It was actually quite eerie.

All the houses were in disrepair,

but some of them still had a lot of evidence of habitation,

you could still see the different coloured paint on the wall.

Walking around, you felt you were intruding on somebody else's life.

Tommy knew that a tough community still lived here

during the first half of the 20th century,

so he set about searching for former members.

75-year-old Martin Murray

was born and raised on inishark,

and he remembers a frugal childhood in his family home.

This is the kitchen of the house here now, you know,

and that's the fireplace,

and that's where all the cooking was done.

And the table was here, chairs and everything.

We all sat around and that's where we all had our meals and all that.

This is the room that I slept in and my bed, I'll never forget,

used to be over here, going that way, you know.

There used to be a mantelpiece across there,

and we also had an open fireplace in the room.

But what drew families like Martin's to these shores?

Inishark's glorious isolation

has attracted religious pilgrims for more than 1,000 years.

The land was both a humble sanctuary

and a cultural vanguard

that attracted people from around the world.

Holy men who came here

felt that they were closer to god

than those at the centre of civilisation.

Archaeologists like Tommy believe that a Christian community

was established here as early as the 6th century.

Those here devoted their lives to contemplation and prayer

in these tiny stone built cells known as clochans.

This is the beehive, the clochan,

and it's the main surviving feature

of this period of the Christian community.

Originally, it was a place

where the monks or the priests would have read their prayers,

would have read the gospels.

Clochan Leo, as it's known,

would once have had a special conical stone roof,

kind of beehive shaped,

it was a secluded oratory for private devotions.

Although this is all that remains of the clochans of inishark,

it's clear to see that everything here

was part of an important religious ceremony.

Clochan Leo is believed to be

the last in a 14 station pilgrimage

on the island representing Jesus' last walk.

The pilgrims would do circuits and stop and pray

and say rosaries and spend a day in prayer and in pilgrimage.

Following in the pilgrims footsteps,

Tommy finds further evidence of their life of devotion and faith.

Another station is a blonde stone,

a common feature of Irish monastic sites.

The circular depression at the top

is often said to be the imprint of a saints body,

and the islanders believed that

the water that collected there

could cure all manner of minor ailments.

Over the centuries, pilgrims came and went,

and in time the settlement of inishark grew.

We know from around the mid-1700s onwards,

there was a permanent settlement here.

They worked very hard,

many of them were fishers

and they were well known as being these great rowers,

sometimes they would even row out seven miles

to some better fishing grounds.

There was a period in the 19th century

that Ireland became quite a coveted place to live.

There were very rich fishing waters,

the agriculture of land was pretty good,

and people came in certain numbers.

A chapel was built here in 1894,

and a school in 1898,

and for this isolated sparsely populated area,

this was a real building boom.

But despite the growing infrastructure,

much still had to be rowed across

from the neighbouring island of baffin.

One essential import was a priest.

Once a month, a priest would be rowed across the water to inishark.

Martin Murray recalls his visits to inishark's quirky chapel.

I remember my mother,

she'd be polishing our shoes, she'd be ironing our shirts,

she'd be fixing us all and making us proper for mass on a Sunday.

As you look at the chapel though,

it feels as if there's something missing

and it's not just the roof,

for a place of worship, there's nowhere to sit.

The women would have had to bring their own wooden three legged stools

while the men would have just lined up against the walls.

But the priest only came once a month,

so inishark's more devote residents

made the perilous boat journey to baffin for weekly worship.

Life here was incredibly tough,

you were really exposed to the elements,

so the people would have had to face the harsh unceasing winds

and the driving rain that came in on the Atlantic storms.

Eventually, the treacherous seas around inishark

claimed their victims.

On easter Sunday 1949, the weather was severe,

a Gale was blowing and the currents were strong.

Most residents decided it was too dangerous

to cross to the next island to go to church,

but two brothers and a cousin decided they would have a go.

The three men successfully made it to baffin,

but the storm had worsened by the time they returned.

As they were leaving and coming back, the ocean got them.

I remember seeing all the people crying

and it was a terrible loss to the village,

three young men in their prime of life,

getting drowned and only one of them was found.

The awful event struck fear in to the people of inishark.

There was no local doctor,

there was no priest,

and the government even refused to install a telephone line.

In 1958, tragedy hit the island again.

One man fell drastically ill

when the weather was too bad to launch the boats,

cut off and with no telephone,

the islanders lit a bonfire

to alert their neighbours on the island of baffin

that they needed help, but their signal went unnoticed.

Trapped on inishark, the man's prospects looked bleak.

I remember them talking about it the next day.

And then they discovered that this poor man had died.

No doctors could get to him

and worse in the minds of many of the people of inishark,

no priest could get to him

to give him his last rites,

and this was a kind of final straw for many of the people on inishark.

The island's population quickly dwindled,

and two years later,

the government relocated

the remaining 23 inhabitants to the mainland.

And the entire remaining population of inishark

departed with one exception.

Thomas Lacey, the father of two of the three boys

that had drowned in 1949, refused to leave.

And Thomas sets his table for one last dinner

and he sets out three plates.

One for himself and one each for his missing boys.

He has his dinner, he prays,

and the next morning when the priest comes,

Thomas gets on the boat and leaves inishark for good.

The rocky isle will always hold pride of place

in Ireland's spiritual history.

It is important in its own right.

It's part of the stitches that make up the whole tapestry.

The loss of community

was a loss to the whole culture of the coast as well.

The island of inishark symbolises joy,

symbolises tragedy,

but fits itself in this great museum of Ireland.

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