The Real-life Flintstones House

The incredible holiday home is carved between four granite boulders and comes with a swimming pool and bulletproof windows but there's no electricity. It looks primitive but the stone house is well-equipped with a fireplace and a pool carved out of one of the rocks could have been a yabba dabba do time.

The real life Flintstones house also known as Casa do Penedo, or House of Stone.  This strange dwelling was built in northern Portugal’s Fafe Mountains perched at an elevation of nearly 2,600ft. This house has been converting into tourist magnet after being transformed into a museum though earlier this was a holiday home by a family. Now this stone of house has earned a reputation as a real-life “Flintstones house”. However, it is ot precise, why the original owners required bulletproof doors and windows. Portuguese photographer Ricardo Oliveira Mateus, 34, recently returned to the 16.5-ft tall house to capture its unusual character.

The house was built in 1972 from four large boulders that serve as the foundation, walls and ceiling of the house. Due to its uncommon design and integration into the surrounding nature, the building has become a growing tourist attraction being really impressed by the house architecture and the magnificent view around it.

The Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği Turkey

This Anatolia region was conquered by the Turks at the start of the 11th century, and then in 1228–29 Emir Ahmet Shah founded a mosque, with its adjoining hospital, at Divrigi. The mosque has a single prayer room and is crowned by two cupolas. The Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği is a remarkable building combining a monumental hypostyle mosque with a two storey hospital, which includes a tomb, located on the slopes below the castle of Divriği, Sivas Province in central eastern Turkey.

The Mosque and Hospital is an ornately decorated mosque and hospital complex built in 1228-1229 by the local dynasty of the “Mengujekids” in the small eastern Anatolian town of Divriği, now in Sivas Province in Turkey. The mosque (Masjid) and hospital adjoins in building complex, which shares qibla wall. The main entrance to the mosque is marked by a tall portal which is celebrated for the quality and density of its high-relief stone carving. The other entrance side had collapsed and was rebuilt at later stage. Therefore, third entrances of the mosque have served a royal entrance reserved for the ruler and his entourage. The name of the chief architect is inscribed in the interior of both the mosque and the hospital and has been read as Khurramshāh b. Mughīth al-Khilātī.

The Great Mosque of Divriği is the most splendid example of the mosques built during the Seljuk Period mixture of Baroque, Seljuk and Gothic styles, but nevertheless represents a unique and distinct style of their own. Moreover, mosque interior comprises of stone piers actually help in stone vaults. The central bay of the mosque left open for sky and original wooden furnishing survive along its Qibla wall. The mosque window opening to the tomb chamber within the hospital and its wooden minar dated back to 1243 and signed by the craftsman Ibrahīm b. Ahmad al-Tiflīsī. Even some carved wooden panels to belong to the royal platform are today on view in the museum of the Directorate of Pious Endowments in Ankara. The Great Mosque and Hospital remain intact retaining the key attributes carrying outstanding universal value, setting the complex is vulnerable to the impact of surrounding development.

The superb carvings and architecture of both structures place them amongst the most significant works of architecture in Anatolia and led to their inclusion on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1985. The hospital portal located on the western façade, different in design from the north portal of the mosque and framed by a monumental pointed arch and features a window in the center. The inscription on the portal of the hospital describes the building as a dār al-shifā' “house of healing” and ascribes its foundation to Tūrān Malik bint. The stone carving is the same quality as the main mosque portal but is less dense and appears, in certain places, to be unfinished. The hospital interior comprises of rooms and iwans.  The hospital has a second story on its southern side which is reached by a staircase just inside the entrance. One of the rooms of the hospital was dedicated to serve as a dynastic tomb chamber. This room has a window opening to the mosque.

Elephant Foot Glacier

The unique “Elephant Foot Glacier” in northeastern Greenland looks like a bowl of batter that has been poured over a pan. The Elephant Foot Glacier is located on the Kronprins Christian Land peninsula. The sheer pressure of the zillion-ton ice has broken through the mountain and spilled into the sea in close to symmetric, fan-shaped lobe. 

This kind of glaciers is known as “piedmont glaciers”, and the Elephant Foot Glacier is a textbook example of it. Its form is so distinctive that it stands out melodramatically from its environments when viewed from high above. Glaciers are one of the most strange of the earth’s natural phenomena. These rivers of frozen snow amassed from numbers of centuries of precipitation are so thickly packed that it surpasses its overall ablation. 

They’re in a continuous state of flux, flowing down in the direction of the slope in the direction of a valley or a water body. Therefore, you can’t really tell if it’s moving but come back in a few decades and you’ll be able to see the intense change in the landscape. The Elephant Foot Glaciers is not connected to Greenland’s main ice sheet. Rather, it’s part of a network of glaciers and ice caps that hangs around the periphery of the island. Moreover, exploration has shown that as an entire, these remote glaciers and ice caps account for five to seven % of Greenland’s total ice coverage, but they are accountable for 20 % of its contribution to sea level rise. 

Moreover, another example of piedmont glaciers is the “Malaspina Glacier” in southeastern Alaska. A 65 kilometer long and 45-km wide, it is the largest piedmont glacier in the world. The glacier arises where several valley glaciers, primarily the Seward Glacier and Agassiz Glacier, spill out from the Saint Elias Mountains onto the coastal plain facing the Gulf of Alaska.

The Ancient Bent Pyramid of Dahshur

Approximately 40 kilometers from South of Cairo, a beautiful Bent Pyramid located at the royal necropolis of Dahshur. This is unique marvel in the area, and popular tourist destination as well. It is so called one of unusual pyramids of ancient Egypt, famous for numerous pyramids. This specific pyramid was fairly popular due to outside archaeological circles, however there as an army camp adjacent and restricted no go area. The Pyramid eventually brings into being with a very steep angle of 54 degrees but halfway through construction the builders comprehended that the angle was too steep. Therefore, the upper half was completed at a shallower angle of 43-degrees to avoid the structure from collapsing. This reason gives the Pyramid a “bent” appearance leading to its modern name.

It is strongly believed that the Bent Pyramid was the first Egyptian pyramid intended by its builders to be a "true" smooth-sided pyramid from the outset. Previous pyramids were either stepped, or first built as stepped and later filled in to make a smooth outer casing. The “Bent Pyramid” also boasts of being the only pyramid to have its unique polished limestone outer casing largely intact. Numerous Egyptian pyramids, including the “Great Pyramid of Giza”, at first had a smooth outer casing of highly polished white limestone that must have be skilled at dazzlingly under the desert sun. Nevertheless, these were stripped away during far ahead generations and carted off to build other structures around Egypt. Moreover, the blocks of stones we see these days on the pyramids are actually core structure. On the “Bent Pyramid”, the outer casing is still noticeable which helps to show how the ancient Egyptians intended their pyramids to look, though it has lost its shine and parts of it are crumbling away. The Bent Pyramid is distinctive in having two entrances. The first entrance is on the north face around twelve meters above ground level, while the second entrance is on the west face around one meter marginally above ground level.

The Pyramid was commissioned by “Sneferu”, who was the father of “Khufu”, who commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza. Therefore, Snefru’s first major undertaking was the Pyramid at Meidum which was originally began by his father King Huni. Though, Sneferu never finished the pyramid. Though, it was believed that the Meidum Pyramid had partially malformed during construction and was consequently abandoned. Sneferu then moved his capital to “Dahshur” where he started constructing his second pyramid, the Bent Pyramid. Sneferu’s third and his last pyramid stand around one kilometer to the north of the Bent Pyramid.  Which is called “Red Pyramid” or the “North Pyramid” actually the largest and the most effective of the three. So as the time goes, he learned from his past mistakes, Sneferu ordered the Red Pyramid to build at the same shallow 43 degree angle as the upper section of the Bent Pyramid, which gave the pyramid a noticeably squat appearance compared to other Egyptian pyramids of comparable scale. The Red Pyramid was the first productively completed smooth-sided pyramid of Egypt, a project that was later adopted by numerous of his successors including his son Khufu, when he built the magnificent “Great Pyramid of Giza”.