Cities are alive and require ongoing maintenance. Turkey didn’t care.
She needed her meds, hairbrush, and apartment photo. Abruzzo’s city, L’Aquila, was devastated by an earthquake in 2009. The woman and her sister sneaked into the city after officials closed it. I discovered her leaning on a cane in a broken, deserted square peering up at a midcentury structure that the quake had sheared horizontally, resembling a pot with its lid off. She requested aid.
From afar, we count deaths and ruined buildings in disasters like Turkey and Syria. Reports depict a massive disaster zone, delayed recovery attempts, and hundreds of thousands of victims lying buried, living and dead, under the wreckage.
Losing lives and history is too much. The tiny Jewish community in Antakya, central Turkey, is 2,500 years old. The tremor killed the town leader and his wife. Its synagogue is gone.
Habibi Neccar Mosque collapsed too. The earthquake was global. The mosque dates from 638. Depending on the city governance, it was a church or mosque. Over the years, Antakya was ruled by the caliphs, Byzantines, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and Turkey. The earthquake wiped history.
The word “Christian” originated in Antakya, the biblical city of Antioch. Before founding Rome, Peter oversaw the church there. Paul preached in Antioch.
The earthquake destroyed St. Paul Orthodox Church. We forget how vulnerable cities are until something
like this happens, then we struggle to reconstruct them. Cities are living, thus we instinctively want to urbanize. Like all living things, they require regular care to thrive. Turkey didn’t. Building standards were changed after a 1999 earthquake killed 17,000.
However, officials tolerated developers who ignored seismic regulations and failed to verify projects that apparently complied. In 2018, Turkey provided amnesty to developers who breached codes in exchange for money. “We create the laws correctly, but we do not implement them,” Pelin Pinar Giritlioglu, president of the Istanbul branch of the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, told my colleagues James Glanz and Ceylan Yeginsu. A Turkish government body told The Associated Press that over half of the country’s buildings don’t
meet earthquake criteria. Antakya and L’Aquila are earthquake-prone. Pope Clement XI sent priests and nuns released from celibacy to L’Aquila after a 1349 earthquake killed 800 people and in 1703 killed more than 3,000. The 2009 earthquake killed over 300, ruined hundreds of historical buildings, and displaced tens of thousands.
Italian officials quickly resettled survivors in tents and temporary homes on the outskirts of town and on the seaside, pledging to reconstruct. These “new towns” and prefab houses were called an “Italian marvel” by boastful Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. But these miserable, pricey, tiny villages, distant from the transit and civic life, became permanent as years passed, contractors’ mafia ties were investigated, and L’Aquila’s rehabilitation languished. Rebuilding in dangerous regions may seem counterintuitive. Climate change is a threat.
Scientists expect massive migrations from areas where rising seas, floods, droughts, and extreme weather will make life difficult or impossible. Climate change has uprooted millions worldwide. Logic is irrelevant.
Cities are just theoretically bricks and mortar. Residents see them as keepers of a hairbrush and a photograph threads of a social fabric that, over time, knit together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, and a community. The least government can do is ensure that buildings and streets meet the code and that cities serve inhabitants, not developers and politicians. That’s rare in most places.
After the earthquake, I encountered a group of men talking in the deserted Piazza Duomo. Antonio Antonacci, a retired lawyer, told me the earthquake destroyed his house. He lived with family an hour distant. He said he was lucky, but every week he returned to the piazza to see his old pals, who had scattered like him. Before the earthquake, they smoked cigars and passed the afternoon. The city was ruined. But home.
