Not a stone is left unturned in the old town of Antioch, known to Arabs and Turks as Antakya. The mourning for the victims of the earthquake is joined by the lament for the blows to cultural heritage, in this and other legendary cities, on the borders of Turkey and Syria. They will never be the same again.
Twice thousand-year-old walls, in Diyarbakir or Gaziantep, have partially collapsed. In dozens of mosques and churches – and even in some synagogues – the walls have given way and several domes have collapsed. In many cases, they will have to be rebuilt for the umpteenth time, in an area that has repeatedly experienced devastating earthquakes since antiquity. Both in the aforementioned localities and in others, from Kahramanmaras to Malatya and from Samandag to Iskenderun, the old Alexandretta.
The last earthquake, on February 6, shook a strip of eastern Turkey larger than Portugal. Destroying, together with blocks of flats, references of the civilizations that have germinated there. To this we must add the damage in neighboring Syria, from the citadel of Aleppo, a world heritage site, to the Crusader castle of Margat.
In Turkey, some of the temples that survived the first 7.7 magnitude tremor have succumbed to one of its most powerful aftershocks. The one last Monday destroyed the orthodox church of San Elías de Samandag, according to what the Colombian art critic Arie Amaya-Akkerman, who lives halfway between said city and Istanbul, recalls for La Vanguardia.
“Taking advantage of the fact that the power had returned less than 24 hours ago, accompanied by the priest Abdulah, we visited the church, which only had scratches,” he explains. “But as soon as we got back to the car, we felt the tremor and saw it go down five meters.”
This correspondent also verified the complete collapse of the roof and one of the sides of the Catholic church of Alejandreta, with the altar covered in rubble and its saints and its virgin out in the open, two days after the earthquake.
Near the epicenter, in Kahramanmaras, the minaret of the Great Mosque collapsed. While in Malatya the New Mosque, from the 16th century, collapsed and in Gaziantep the Sirvani mosque, from the same century.
In Antakya, meanwhile, “it would be easier to list what was not lost,” according to Akkermans. At the Hatay Archeology Museum – the Turkish name for the province – its director, Ayse Ersoy, affirms that the collections were “at no time” unattended and that reinforcement personnel from other museums came.
Despite the damage to the buildings, he affirms, there are no appreciable damages to the Roman mosaics of Antioch – the most extensive in the world – nor to their artifacts, which were transferred from their showcases to a safe place.
Antakya is also home to “the oldest mosque in Turkey”. That of Habib the Carpenter, who presided over, until three Mondays ago, an impressive minaret, where a church and even before a temple had been built. The only consolation is knowing that, in Antakya as in Kathmandu, everything is more venerable in books than in reality, since the average of a great earthquake every century and a half -the previous one, in 1870- has forced constant reconstructions.
“Antioch’s great fame is not corroborated by archaeology,” acknowledges Akkermans. The smell of freshly made Arab bread remained, yes, in its most impoverished streets. Before, living nativity scenes and today deserted and impassable due to rubble. This social fabric, which gave meaning to architecture, is what is now in danger.
“What has already been lost is the identity of the place and rebuilding it will be much more difficult than rebuilding it”, predicts the art critic. “Antioch is now a ghost town.” Something doubly serious, because “this was the last corner of plurality that remained in Turkey.”
Antakya is a city with many Alawite Muslims and quite a few Christians. Among them, those over 50 are fluent in Arabic. “They are the owners of the city. The Sunni Turks are the ‘immigrants,’” Akkermans clarifies. For this reason, the transition to the war in Syria of thousands of Sunni extremists from all over the world made the natives’ hair stand on end.
The people of Antioquia were protesting then against those who wanted to impose the sharia, according to them, and who are still entrenched in the neighboring Syrian province of Idlib. “The Anglophone media don’t care. They are with the Islamists”, sentence Akkermans.
Conversely, many Syrian refugees, almost all Sunnis, settled in Antakya. “But not in Samandag, where they didn’t want them.”
Even more fragile is Vakifli, the only remaining Armenian village in Turkey, next door. The baptismal font and thirty of its forty houses have been damaged, but none of its neighbors have died, who are now trying to keep warm by drinking tea, due to the lack of electricity.
In Antakya itself, churches of all denominations have collapsed, including the Orthodox, which was the patriarchal seat for centuries.
There has been more luck with the essential rock church of San Pedro, founded by the same father of the Church. Instead, it is feared for the ruins of the monastery of Simeon the Stylite, difficult to access. “It is not known how it is, the same as the monastery of Barlaam and a nearby site, from the Bronze Age.”
At this end of Turkey, much closer to Aleppo than to Ankara, they complain of abandonment. “Civil protection, half an hour away, it took 14 hours to arrive,” grumbles Arie Amaya-Akkermans. “It was hard, because my partner has lost his grandparents, who were registered as deceased number 360 and 361 of Samandag.”
Walid, a reporter of Iraqi origin who lived in Antakya, has finally managed to contact several friends: “They have all lost relatives.”
To all this pain, the Zaka rescue team added a bizarre note. An Israeli orthodox organization that could not save the leader of the tiny but thousand-year-old Jewish community of Antakya, Saul, nor his wife, Fortuna.
Zaka left Turkey shortly after, although not empty-handed, his networks showed. They had been made with a Hebrew manuscript of the Story of Esther, on a “200-year-old” parchment, much older in appearance. The scandal over the looting has forced the return of the liturgical scrolls, now in the hands of the Jewish community in Istanbul.
“Lightning rules all things,” said Heraclitus of Ephesus. And the Turkish elections, just around the corner, will no longer be the same. The Minister of Culture promises a great rehabilitation campaign. But the exodus has already begun. It is the fate of today’s Turkey, which is increasingly restoring the heritage of communities that another Turkey expelled forever.
