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Turkey, Syria earthquake marks new horror in land scarred by disaster


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In 1114, a monstrous earthquake hit areas of what’s now southern Turkey and northern Syria. Matthew of Edessa, an Armenian chronicler, described what befell the land in apocalyptic terms: “It sounded like the din made by a multitudinous army. From fear of the power of the Lord God, all creation shook and trembled like a churning sea,” he wrote. “All the plains and mountains resounded like the clanging of bronze, shaking and moving about and tossing about like trees in a hurricane. Like a person sick for a long time, all creation produced cries and groans as, with great dread, they were expecting their destruction.”

Matthew detailed how the “populous” city of Marash “was terribly destroyed and some 40,000 souls perished.” In his account, there were no survivors.

On Monday, rescuers in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, site of the historical Marash, were counting the dead and searching for lost loved ones. The provincial capital was near the epicenter of a major earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, that impacted parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria, and was felt across the Mediterranean in Cyprus and as far as Egypt. Dozens of powerful aftershocks followed the initial quake, collapsing tens of thousands of buildings in cities across the region.

The combined death toll in both Turkey and Syria is estimated to be more than 4,300. Given the scale of the destruction and the timing of the temblor — it struck in the depths of the night, when most people were asleep — authorities expect that number to rise further. As night fell Monday, residents in towns hit by the quakes found themselves in states of desperation amid devastation, lacking food and shelter in grim wintry conditions with nowhere to go.


Aftershocks above 5-magnitude as of 7.30 am Eastern

Direction of plate movement

Source: Natural Earth, USGS

SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST

Aftershocks above 5-magnitude as of 7.30 am Eastern

Direction of plate movement

Source: Natural Earth, USGS

SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST

Aftershocks above 5-magnitude as of 7.30 am Eastern

Direction of plate movement

Source: Natural Earth, USGS

SAMUEL GRANADOS / THE WASHINGTON POST

A dire situation in northwest Syria: Devastating quake amid civil war

My colleagues on the ground and elsewhere are tracking developments closely. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a week of national mourning as his government scrambled relief efforts and welcomed international assistance. Many towns and cities could not be initially reached by outside rescue teams with roads and critical infrastructure badly damaged, on top of severe winter weather.

The situation is all the more complicated in northwestern Syria, where some of the worst hit areas are under rebel control. Millions of people already displaced by war are coping with a new calamity and an entrenched Syrian regime in Damascus that remains intent on blocking cross-border deliveries of supplies to rebel-held areas. Hospitals in these areas had been stretched by a cholera outbreak; their conditions now are “catastrophic,” according to one Syrian aid group.

Southern Turkey and northwestern Syria sit at a kind of hinge point of three tectonic plates — the Arabian, Anatolian and African plates. “As they slide past and squeeze against each other, they build up friction and stress that gets released as earthquakes,” explained Washington Post science reporter Carolyn Y. Johnson.

In recent history, the worst quakes in Turkey have taken place along the North Anatolian fault line, which runs across the northern edge of the country and through the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. Scientists say this is the first 7-plus magnitude tremor on record to hit further south along the boundary of the Arabian and Anatolian Plate since readings began around the turn of the past century. The last nearest earthquake of this size took place over 150 miles northeast of Monday’s epicenter in 1939.

Why the Turkey earthquake was so deadly, according to science

But as Matthew of Edessa’s chronicle reminds us, this part of the world is no stranger to disastrous seismic events. Steeped in antiquity and home to some of humanity’s oldest civilizations, the lands of southern Turkey and Syria have a long record of earthquakes, stretching back thousands of years to the kingdoms of the Hittites and city-states of Mesopotamia.

In 115 A.D., a quake estimated by seismologists to have been a 7.5 magnitude devastated the ancient metropolis of Antioch and nearly killed Roman emperor Trajan, who was wintering there after a military campaign. Modern-day Antakya, the Turkish city that sits atop the ruins of Antioch, was ravaged by Monday’s tremors.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio recounted the moment of disaster: “First there came… a great bellowing roar, and this was followed by a tremendous quaking,” he wrote in his histories of Rome. “The whole earth was upheaved, and buildings leaped into the air; some were carried aloft only to collapse and be broken in pieces, while others were tossed this way and that as if by the surge of the sea, and overturned, and the wreckage spread out over a great extent even of the open country.”

Ancient estimates of casualties at the time claim some 260,000 people died, though these figures are hardly reliable. A similar number of people were said to have died in 526 A.D., when another earthquake struck the then-Byzantine city of Antioch.

Major earthquakes hit the region with some regularity through to the 19th century. In 1822, Aleppo, Syria, was close to the epicenter of an earthquake that devastated the famous city, killing thousands of people, reducing mosques, synagogues and churches to rubble, and forcing much of the city’s remaining population to camp out in its environs as disease and looting took hold.

A dire situation in northwest Syria: Devastating quake amid civil war

Aleppo, of course, had endured major disasters throughout its storied history. On Monday, footage showed buildings collapsing in a city already ravaged by years of war. In the 12th century, though, Aleppo and the broader region that is now digging its way out of the wreckage was the site of what one academic has described as a “seismic paroxysm” — a wave of destructive earthquakes, from the 1114 tremors that laid low Marash to a 1170 quake along the Levantine coast, which fundamentally reshaped the political and social conditions in these realms that were locked in the throes of the Crusades.

One of the biggest events was an October 1138 earthquake that was followed by deadly aftershocks that continued into the following year. The 12th century Arab chronicler Ibn al-Athir described the initial tremors, which medieval historians claimed led to the deaths of close to 300,000 people. “There was a series of them over several nights, with a number of tremors every night. Much of the country was ruined, especially Aleppo,” he wrote. “The people there, when the tremors became too much for them, left their homes and went into open country. In a single night they counted eighty tremors.”

In 1157, another earthquake ravaged Syria, toppling walls and fortifications in Aleppo as well as other cities and fortresses controlled by both Crusader kings and local Muslim potentates. Whole cities, like Shayzar in Syria, were said to have been destroyed.

Usamah ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman and poet who was the nephew of the Shayzar’s emir, escaped the disaster because he had been sent on a mission to Damascus. He mourned the loss of his entire family: “Death did not advance step by step to destroy the people of my race, to annihilate them separately or to strike them down two by two,” he wrote. “They all died in the twinkling of an eye, and their palaces became their tombs.”



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