Among statues huge dinosaurs and 17 roller coasters, Wonderland Eurasia was projected as the Park largest attraction in Europe; painted to be a “source of pride,” according to the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Instead, the expensive carousels, which have been rusting since the facility closed a year after its inauguration in March 2019, have become the waste symbol and the excess of some leaders of the presidential party, the AKP.
The outrage aroused by the construction of this immense project, as useless as it was onerous, contributed to ending the long reign of the Islamoconservatives in Ankara, where the opposition won in the last municipal elections in 2019.
This setback, unprecedented for Erdogan, was also a warning to the head of state, in the face of a double presidential and legislative election that looks complicated in 2023, with economic problems in the background.
The problems around Wonderland Eurasia emerged quickly. Two days after the opening of the part, a train got stuck on top of a roller coaster. The passengers had to get off on foot.
In 2020, Wonderland Eurasia closed its doors, leaving a strong feeling of bitterness.
“What Ankara needed is not an amusement park. It was (an improvement) of transport”, laments Tezca Karakus Candan, president of the Chamber of Architects of the Turkish capital.
“Was a extravagant project“, he adds, remembering that there was already another similar park in the city.
Chasm in the ruling class
The municipality brought to justice the company responsible for Wonderland Eurasia with the idea of getting your control and taking advantage of the extensive terrain where you are. The court decision is scheduled for September 13.
According to the current mayor, of the opposition, Mansur yavas, this project inherited from its predecessor, Melih Gökçek, cost more than 680 million euros (about 800 million dollars).
Gökçek, in charge of Ankara from 1994 to 2017, rejects that figure and points out that the cost was 420 million euros (almost 500 million dollars).
The idea was that Wonderland Eurasia would help develop tourism in Ankara, an essentially administrative city much less frequented by tourists than Istanbul or the seaside resorts in the south of the country.
Gökçek claimed that the park would attract 10 million visitors annually to Ankara. It was half in 2019.
For Güven Arif Sargin, professor of architecture at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, wanting to turn the capital into a tourist center was a “childish quirk.”
For Erdogan’s detractors, this project has become a symbol of the gulf that exists between the ruling class and the concerns of the population.
“Melih Gökçek reflects the way in which the local AKP administrations betray the cities, in which they act to implement a process of looting,” Candan estimates.
But for many Ankara residents, Gökçek’s main mistake was not to carry out an expensive installation, it was to have destroyed a natural space linked to the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
In the “Atatürk Forest Farm“, started in 1925, there was a zoo and gardens. The founder of the republic created the space to respond to the future agricultural needs of the capital.
For opponents of the project, the construction of an amusement park in this symbolic location is part of the government’s campaign to erase Atatürk’s legacy.
DMZ
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source https://pledgetimes.com/wonderland-eurasia-park-left-abandoned-in-turkey-so-it-looks/
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