On the Don, the Khazars built Sarkel with Byzantine engineers, a brick fortress guarding steppe trade routes, now submerged beneath a reservoir but saved by archaeology.

Almost everyone who comes to this corner of Bavaria comes to see Neuschwanstein, the impossibly famous fairy-tale castle on its crag. But there is a second castle in the valley

On the edge of a sheer cliff in southern Germany, so close to the drop that it seems to grow out of the rock itself, stands a slender white castle

Deep in the wooded hills of the Spessart, in a hidden valley far from any main road, there is a castle so perfectly pretty and so perfectly placed that it

In the wooded hills of the Harz, in the heart of Germany, there is a town of painted timber houses so pretty that it looks like a stage set, and

In the north of Germany, in a region of a thousand lakes, there is a castle that seems to rise straight out of the water. Set on its own small

In the far southeast of Iran, near the border with Afghanistan, lies a vast field of low mounds and scattered pottery baking under the sun of the Sistan desert. This

Some places seem to belong more to legend than to history, and Sigiriya is one of them. Rising almost two hundred meters sheer from the jungle plains of central Sri

Rising almost two hundred metres straight out of the green plains of central Sri Lanka is a sheer column of rock crowned with ancient ruins. This is Sigiriya, the Lion

Four thousand years ago on the Ural steppe, fortified villages produced the earliest known war chariots, advanced metallurgy, and perhaps the roots of the Indo-Iranian world.