Naci Gorur, a geologist, has become a household name in Turkey for imploring the country to prepare for quakes he has predicted. He has been disappointed by the response and is deeply worried about Istanbul.
The news that a powerful earthquake had struck southern Turkey first reached the eminent geologist in a pre-dawn video call from a phone number he did not recognize.
Barely awake, he answered to find himself face-to-face with a woman and her daughter trapped in the rubble of their collapsed home.
“Professor, please save us,” he recalled the woman saying. But the call cut out and he lost the number in the flood of calls he received that day. He never learned who the woman was or what had happened to her.
“I cried for two hours,” said the geologist, Naci Gorur, a retired professor who has made it his life’s work to warn Turks about the tremendous threat that earthquakes pose to their country and to implore them to prepare.
The woman had called after the first of the two powerful quakes that hit southern Turkey on Feb. 6 of this year, together killing more than 50,000 people in Turkey and 6,000 in neighboring Syria.
They were the deadliest quakes in Turkey’s modern history, and as the scale of the carnage became clear that day, Dr. Gorur lamented that so little had been done to prepare for a disaster that he and other scientists had long warned about.
“As geologists, we grew tired of saying and writing that this earthquake was coming,” he wrote. “No one reacted.”
Dr. Gorur’s response to the quakes was the most recent chapter in his personal, yearslong earthquake awareness campaign, which has earned him celebrity status in Turkey.
In a land with multiple active faults and a history of catastrophic quakes, Dr. Gorur has become the most prominent voice sounding the alarm about seismic threats and suggesting how society can mitigate them.
Instead of enjoying a quiet retirement, Dr. Gorur, 76, packs his schedule with earthquake-related meetings with business owners, utility managers and municipal officials. He appears on television so frequently that people recognize him on the street.
He blasts regular updates to his 2.2 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, explaining plate tectonics, advising Turks to have their homes inspected and retrofitted if needed, and telling them to press their government to build safer cities. He also issues warnings about faults that he fears could shift soon and set off violent tremors.
Since the February quakes, he has fielded a constant barrage of personal queries by phone, text and social media from Turks asking whether their towns are in danger and if they should relocate.
One recent message came from a student in southern Turkey who was struggling to sleep because he was so terrified that a new quake would topple his building.
Was another big earthquake on the way? the student, Abdulkadir Asana, 20, wrote. Should he abandon his city?
Dr. Gorur read the message aloud in the book-lined office of his Istanbul home and sighed heavily. He receives so many such queries that he struggles to keep up, he said. But he understood why so many strangers reached out.
“Because they are scared,” he said.
It was also because in the search for trustworthy information about earthquakes, many people did not trust the government, Turkey’s universities or its disaster relief organization, he said. So they turned to him, and he tried to help.
“It is to show people a way, so that they don’t die,” he said.
Despite his years of public warnings, he turned grim when asked how much difference his voice has made in increasing Turkey’s earthquake preparedness.
“I don’t think it has had much effect,” he said. “Neither at the level of the public nor at the level of local governments.”
