The Most Beautiful Abandoned Villages in Asia
5 places in 5 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful abandoned villages in Asia are Kharanaq (Iran), Kayaköy (Turkey) and Khndzoresk (Armenia). The list covers 5 abandoned villages in 5 countries. Armenia has the most, with 1. Last updated 14 October 2026.
An abandoned village tells its story through what it was built from. In the dry lands of Iran and the Caucasus that means mud brick, stone and caves cut into soft rock, materials that hold their shape for generations after the last family leaves. Wars, earthquakes, new roads and the pull of the cities emptied these places, and their silence makes the old way of building easier to read than in any living town.
Kharanaq, near Yazd, is a mud-brick village on a rocky spur with a caravanserai and a slender minaret said to shake when climbed. Kayaköy near Fethiye, once the Greek town of Levissi, is a hillside of hundreds of roofless stone houses, empty since the population exchange of 1923. Khndzoresk in Armenia is a cave village dug into the walls of a gorge, lived in until the mid-20th century. Houtouwan, on an island of the Shengsi archipelago, is a fishing village whose houses have vanished under green climbing plants. Gamsutl in Dagestan sits on a mountain summit, its stone houses climbing the rock almost to the sky.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kharanaq | Abandoned village | Iran | |
| 2 | Kayaköy | Abandoned village | Turkey | |
| 3 | Khndzoresk | Abandoned village | Armenia | |
| 4 | Houtouwan Village | Abandoned village | People's Republic of China | |
| 5 | Gamsutl | Abandoned village | Russia |
01 Kharanaq
Iran32.346° N 54.666° E
مهدی خبره دست · CC BY-SA 4.0 The heart of the old village is its fortified core, a dense citadel of houses of two and three storeys, with watchtowers and a surrounding wall. Its origins are often traced to the Sasanian period, and local accounts claim a history of settlement stretching back thousands of years; neither can be dated precisely, but the place is certainly very old. Inside, the lanes twist and turn in a deliberately confusing pattern, the story goes to disorient raiders, and many buildings are now collapsed or roofless.
Did you know? The village name is usually explained as 'birthplace of the sun' or 'place of sunrise', from an old Persian word for the sun.
02 Kayaköy
Turkey36.577° N 29.087° E
Nikodem Nijaki · CC BY-SA 3.0 The site has a long pedigree. In antiquity there was a Lycian town here called Karmylessos, and the name survived in shortened form as Lebessos and then Levissi. By the early twentieth century the town was a prosperous Greek Orthodox community of roughly 6,500 people, with a market, a school and more than twenty churches and chapels. Its end came in stages: deportations of families inland from 1916, further exile in the last years of the First World War, and finally the Greek–Turkish population exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923, which sent the remaining Orthodox inhabitants to Greece.
Did you know? The Catholic Church still lists Lebessus as a titular see, although it is long since a residential bishopric.
03 Khndzoresk
Armenia · 34.5 km from Kapan39.512° N 46.434° E
Vahagn Grigoryan · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cave village remained inhabited until the 1950s. At its peak, in 1914, Khndzoresk counted more than 8,300 inhabitants, making it one of the largest villages in the region. In the 1950s its people moved up to the plateau and built New Khndzoresk on the edge of the gorge, and the old caves came to be used as stables and storerooms. In the gorge stand the seventeenth-century church of St. Hripsime, the small cave church of St. Tatevos and the Anapat hermitage, where the eighteenth-century military leader Mkhitar Sparapet, a hero of the Armenian resistance in Syunik, is buried.
Did you know? His tomb in the gorge is the focus of Sparapet Day, a national day of remembrance held every 12 September and attended by Armenia's top leaders.
04 Houtouwan Village
People's Republic of China30.727° N 122.820° E
Milkomède · CC BY-SA 4.0 The village is young by the standards of abandoned places. It grew up in the 1950s and at its height held more than two thousand fishermen and around five hundred homes packed tightly into the cove. From the 1990s the island's isolation began to tell: schooling, supplies and work were all on the mainland, and families left one by one for Shanghai and the coast. Only a handful of people were still there by 1994, and by 2002 Houtouwan was effectively empty, leaving a few residents behind in later years.
Did you know? Some accounts put the village's population at more than 3,000 in the 1980s, making it one of the busiest fishing communities on Shengshan.
05 Gamsutl
Russia42.303° N 46.997° E
Slavyanochka · CC BY-SA 4.0 The age of the village is not known. Local tradition and several writers count it among the oldest settlements in Dagestan, with estimates of two thousand years or more, and its name in Avar is usually translated as "at the foot of the khan's fortress". Its walls carry traces of many periods: Christian crosses have been found here, gravestones with Persian inscriptions, lines of Arabic script on house fronts, and a Star of David once decorated one of the doors. At its height the village had some three hundred houses, and as late as the twentieth century it had shops, a post office and a small hospital with a maternity ward, connected to the outside world by a track passable for vehicles.
Did you know? Estimates of the village's age vary widely, from about two thousand to as much as five thousand years, and its founding date remains unknown.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful abandoned villages in Asia?
- On our list, Kharanaq (Iran) ranks first, followed by Kayaköy (Turkey) and Khndzoresk (Armenia).
- Which country has the most abandoned villages in Asia?
- In our collection, the most come from Armenia (1), Iran (1) and the People's Republic of China (1).
- Why was Kayaköy abandoned?
- Its Greek Orthodox inhabitants left in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and the town was never resettled; an earthquake in 1957 damaged it further.
- What is Houtouwan?
- It is a former fishing village on Shengshan Island in Zhejiang province. After its residents moved away from the 1990s, climbing plants covered the houses almost completely.
- How many abandoned villages are on this list in Asia?
- The list covers 5 abandoned villages in 5 countries. Armenia has the most, with 1.