Antioch, located in Turkey, is on the border with Syria. As the 82-year-old priest Vahit Baklaci explains, “Antakya [the modern name of Antioch] has been around for thousands of years. Here are two destroyed mosques dating from the beginning of Islam. And here, two 2,000-year-old churches from the time of Jesus… also destroyed.”
Before the earthquake, the Turkish Ministry of Culture had classified 719 buildings. When the machines searched for bodies and then cleared the rubble, notices were posted to protect those still standing: “Do not touch without permission.”
A ministry official ensures that the instructions are respected: “If it is too damaged, nothing can be done, but where possible we will demolish it stone by stone,” she explains under cover of anonymity. Six ministry teams patrol the old city. “There were about 50 at the beginning,” she notes.
Whenever possible, the saved stones are stored on a reserved site north of Antakya, sorted, classified, and numbered for future restoration. But envisioning this restoration, while standing in the middle of a field of ruins, is difficult.
Gokhan Ergin, an architect who has restored many houses in the city, picks up one of the orange tiles that litter the ground, disillusioned. Made in Marseille, in the south of France, they were imported in large quantities by the Ottomans and then by the French at the beginning of the 20th century.
“We are in the first places of habitation of the city. These beautiful houses were home to boutique hotels and restaurants,” says one who knows the inner beauty of these buildings. “When you find a work of art, you inventory it to protect it in a museum: these buildings have the same importance. It’s not just about the earth and the stone,” he complains.
The architect notes that the older buildings have been much more resilient to the successive shocks: “Because the planks and the wood inserted between the clay brick structures, due to their elasticity, allowed them to absorb the shock,” he explains. The old buildings that have been damaged have often fallen victim to the collapse of their badly restored neighbors,” he said. His own, he shows, still have their windows and glazing almost intact.
A team from the Istanbul Technical University is working on Kurtulus Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Antakya, which houses the synagogue and the oldest mosque in the region, built on a pagan temple transformed into a church during the time of the first Christians. For Umut Almaç of the restoration department, at least eight hundred additional buildings deserved protection.
In front of an old luxury hotel, with the walls of collapsed cinder blocks, the expert is annoyed by the easy restorations practiced 10 to 20 years ago to seduce tourists. We focused on the façade, without respecting the interior structures of the building.” On February 6, tens of thousands of buildings in southern Turkey collapsed in a matter of seconds.
Umut Almaç would like the reconstruction to progress faster, even if some denounce the haste of the excavators in the old city. “But I don’t think we can move the blocks of stone any other way,” notes the academic.
After the terrible earthquake that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria, reconstruction has become a priority, both to restore some kind of shelter for refugees and to save centuries-old buildings.