By Christian Narkiewicz-Laine
İskenderun in Hatay Province, Turkey

“Three weeks after the quakes, the smell of death still permeates everywhere,” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, President and CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.

On February 7 at approximately 4:00 a.m. when residents were sleeping in their beds, a powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked southern Turkey and Syria, unleashing the mass chaos of devastation, demolishing hundreds of cities, killing over 50,000 people, and creating a vast homeless population of over 55 million people in a matter of seconds.

Minutes later another 7.5 quake destroyed whatever had not been destroyed equal to what experts claim as a total of 32 atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima on an area in Turkey the size of England.

Cemetery graves opened and coffins popped out of the ground; massive cracks appeared in different directions going everywhere in the landscape.

The entire country of Turkey had shifted up to six meters.

It was not just the deadly magnitude of the quakes and the 5.2 magnitude aftershocks, it was the “shallow transcurrent” of the quakes that caused such desolation and human misery on a scale our modern world has never before seen.

It is believed by experts that this was the worst earthquake ever recorded in human history.

I came to southern Turkey to join a humanitarian group of international architects and engineers to survey surviving structures in the earthquake zone to determine which ones could be saved and which ones had been damaged beyond repair and needed to be torn down.

This was a useless task.

Any building with a larger than visible five-inch crack was slated for demolition and spray painted with a red “X.”

That was mostly every single building—new and old.

I also became an eyewitness to the worst and most tragic humanitarian crisis of our time and to volunteer in whatever capacity I could as an architect, writer, and a humanist.

We also specifically looked for any surviving historic structures; and for the Swiss Government, we initiated a needs assessment for the staggering number of displacement camps for the estimated 55 million now homeless.

However, almost every day we stopped the inspections to assist local and foreign crews still pulling the dead out of buildings and hopelessly searching for any more survivors.

There was speculation that tens of thousands more remained buried under collapsed buildings in each and every town in the zone.

It was a surreal scene from the most horrific Science-Fiction movie about the end of the world by nuclear explosion.

Entering the earthquake zone, you are immediately confronted by vast new mountains and new hills of rubble from demolished buildings transported by dump trucks from towns and villages, as well as fresh dug mass graves everywhere.

The scale and demographics are staggering.

City after city, town after town, had been destroyed or vanished.
Some towns instantly vaporized into just dust.

Demolished cars were embedded into the asphalt; collapsed roads, dilapidated bridges, and unstable infrastructure throughout.

Everywhere there were endless piles of building fragments made from inferior building materials, poor quality cement not fit for type of construction, doors and windows, furniture, kitchen appliances, family photographs, and undiscovered, mutilated dead body parts.

My first glimpse of the Turkish cities and villages near İskenderun in Hatay Province was not just the immense damage and destruction, but the local inhabitants wondering about aimlessly and in complete shell-shocked blank stares after losing a neighbor, loved one, or an entire family.

Up and down the devastated streets, the new homeless walked with nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and still trying to come to terms with the unthinkable they had only weeks ago witnessed, experienced, and the instantaneous death of family members and neighbors.

In sections of the cities with eight-ten story high-rise buildings, you could see how the towers simply collapsed upon one another like an endless chain of dominos.

Other towers were simply flattened downward floor by floor, like a plate of neatly stacked pancakes, trapping the residents in between the floors as they slept.

In other towns the high-rises were still dangerously standing, but now empty with former residents in tent cities in parks and flat areas inside and outside the city.

These towns are now “ghost cities.”

No people, no electricity, no water.

Next stop, our team went to the ancient Roman city of Antioch (now called Antakya in Turkish) with a district population of 500,000 people to survey and inspect surviving historic buildings.

The entire city founded over 2,300 years ago has been completely wiped off the map.
Houses, residential and commercial buildings, churches, mosques, hospitals, schools, libraries, city buildings—vanished.

The Swiss took over the only remaining city hospital and provided doctors, medicines, and any healthcare.

The city’s two most famous landmarks—Habib-i Najjar Mosque built in 1275 and the most important Greek Orthodox church in the eastern Mediterranean called the Church of St. Paul and built in 1830—lay in total ruins.

Other historical sites and bridges over the city’s ancient Orontes River have collapsed or slowly crumbling; too dangerous to cross and in quick need to be torn down.

Our team could only map where the city’s historic buildings once stood, now replaced by rubble and dust.

We had Vick’s VapoRub inside our noses to block out the stench of decomposing bodies everywhere.

Passing Turkish army military trucks sprayed everything, including us with disinfectant to halt the spread of deadly Cholera that was now spreading across the region.

Once all the rubble has been removed from Antioch and surrounding cities the area will look like the moon.

Throughout the devastation of the district, there were the sudden appearance of thousands of tent cities in parks and parking lots or any flat open areas.

Most of the tents were brought to Turkey and donated by the governments of China, Pakistan, Australia, Austria, Indonesia, Argentina, Azerbaijan, and South Korea.

And, the current conditions inside these tent cities were appalling.

No schools, no hospitals, no clean water, and no sanitation, which could remain as the only place the millions of earthquake survivors could call “home”—possibly for decades.

The American hamburger chain Burger King set up food stations throughout giving away its famed Whopper sandwiches as the only available food source.

The majority of all this death and carnage could have been avoided.

Before 2011, Turkey had one of the world’s most stringent and rigorous building codes and regulations for new construction or the amnesty for older buildings, which was professionally monitored by the Turkish Union of Chambers of Architects and Engineers and the Chamber of City Planners.

However, the corrupt government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan privatized the system in 2011, giving the review authority to local municipalities, which created what the Turks call “concrete lobbies”—the perfect storm of a system riddled in corruption with money paid in bribes or in exchange for votes to pass, shortcut, or issue new permits for the most inferior buildings built by cut-throat contractors and international investors.

For the last 15 years, the worst, shadowy construction developed throughout the earthquake zone seasoned in payoffs and amnesty bribes going directly to local officials in the municipalities, inspectors, and to the Turkish Ministry of the Environment.

When the Chamber of Architects protested this new “system” and warned of an impending disaster like the recent earthquakes, the Erdoğan regime simply arrested all the opposition and dissenters.

Two architects and a lawyer among a dozen of other human rights activists from the “Gezi Trial” who led the protests were convicted of ‘attempting to overthrow the government’ and now serving 18-year prison sentences.

Erdoğan also mercilessly waited three days before sending any first responders (the ASAM) to the zone to begin any rescue attempt of those trapped inside buildings.

People in neighborhoods had to endure the screams of entombed people for three days as they tried to free them with no tools or equipment but only with their bare hands.

Body after body was unearthed by locals; pulled out and wrapped in tarps and piled up in the streets.

The dead Syrian refugees who fled from the civil war were gathered up and stacked in trucks to be brought back to Syria to be reunited with their grieving families.

Those who luckily enough had cars picked up dead family members and neighbors to be buried outside the cities.

For those who did not have cars, the wrapped corpses remained on the streets for seven to ten days before ASAM and municipal workers picked them up to be interred in mass graves and without the proper Muslim burial rites.

For the most part, it is reported, that the government’s ASAM first responders simply posed for newspaper and television photographs and did nothing to assist the local people.

For several weeks after the earthquake local residents also went on mad search to find missing family and neighbors posting photographs and videos on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and local Turkish sites as the Ekşi Sözlük website.

The Erdoğan regime heartlessly blocked public access to these social media platforms by Turkey’s telecommunications watchdog Information Technologies and Communications Authority (BTK) as a “danger to national security.”

Not far from ancient Antioch is northwestern Syria where the earthquakes flattened the pro-democracy, rebel-held areas of Allepo—still locked in the brutal civil war against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

Hundreds of thousands of city and farming families had been arrested, gassed with chemical weapons, tortured, and reduced to a bleak poverty, causing a mass migration of rural people escaping to urban shantytowns in Turkey.

The recent earthquakes added another layer of tragedy to the already ticking timebomb of Aleppo and Assad’s crimes against humanity: locals had no tools or equipment or any international rescue teams to assist in pulling out people trapped in buildings; but instead, the White Helmets hopelessly dug for the buried with their hands.

The Syrian people in the rebel-held region were already 90% dependent on international foreign aid.

For weeks after the first quakes, Assad kept the Syrian borders locked refusing any trucks with international humanitarian aid or assistance from entering Syria.

Endless lines of United Nations trucks and medical and rescue volunteers for the 5.6 million new homeless Syrians were backed up miles inside Turkey.

Rumors circulated that Assad’s Syrian army was extorting $10,000 per truck to simply enter the country, which was later confirmed by Swiss and other foreign NGOs.

Graffiti on destroyed buildings spray painted by local Syrian residents read: “Thanks for nothing; we are now dead.”

In a matter of weeks, there were over 500 confirmed cases of Cholera in Syria.

NGOs also believe the total death toll will exceed over 100,000 people—double the official Turkish state narrative.

This is perhaps the most devastating human disaster of our lifetime.

This is not only the story of death, destruction, and human misery from several Apocalyptic earthquakes, but also the ongoing genocide and cruelty of the two countries against their local inhabitants.