The Turkey and Syria Earthquakes: February 2023
2023 · event
At seventeen minutes past four in the morning on 6 February 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey near the city of Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border. Most people were asleep. Nine hours later, while rescue work was only beginning, a second earthquake of magnitude 7.5 struck to the north. Together they were among the most destructive earthquakes in the modern history of the region. More than fifty thousand people died in Turkey and thousands more in northern Syria, and millions were left without homes in the middle of winter.
The region sits where the Anatolian plate meets the Arabian plate, and the East Anatolian Fault has produced large earthquakes throughout recorded history. Eleven Turkish provinces were affected, an area with a population of around fourteen million, including cities such as Kahramanmaras, Adiyaman, Hatay and its historic centre Antakya, the ancient Antioch. Northern Syria was already carrying twelve years of war and displacement when the ground moved.
Rescue teams arrived from more than eighty countries and worked for days in freezing temperatures, pulling survivors from collapsed buildings long after hope would normally have ended. Aid convoys struggled to reach parts of Syria across a closed and contested border. In Turkey the collapse of many recently built blocks led to arrests, investigations and a public reckoning with the enforcement of building codes.
The earthquakes changed the conversation about construction and inspection across the region and reminded the world how quickly a modern city can be lost. Reconstruction is measured in years, and the cultural loss, including damage to mosques, churches and castles that had stood for centuries, cannot be rebuilt in the same way. The memory belongs to those who died in their sleep and to the neighbours, volunteers and strangers who dug for them.