The difficult rebirth

Just over two years have passed since February 6, 2023, when a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southwestern Turkey and neighboring Syria. More than 53,700 confirmed victims in Turkey and at least 6,000 in the neighboring country, already devastated by years of civil war. 70% of the houses were razed to the ground. Most of the survivors from the vast seismic front left the devastated area from the outset.

The city of Antakya, the historic capital of Hatay province, better known in the West as Antioch, suffered the strongest and most destructive tremors due to its proximity to a seismic fault. After long months of painstaking work clearing tons of rubble, it is still not easy to understand where the reconstruction plans stand today, and the hopes of rehabilitating the area, possibly making it less vulnerable to catastrophic and unpredictable events whose impact could have been far less severe if adequate infrastructure had been in place. Many survivors who chose not to leave - overcoming fear and enduring the precariousness of spartan container homes - have applied for social housing from the state housing agency, TOKİ, but are often still waiting. On January 26, the Ministry of Urbanization announced that 201,580 homes and shops have been delivered in the earthquake zone and promised a total of 453,000 housing units by the end of 2025. The challenge is to combine speed with construction standards that ensure compliance with basic seismic regulations, often ignored in the past. The new master plan, designed in 2024 by a team of Turkish and international architects from the Turkey Design Council, focuses first on the modern part of the city, on the western bank of the Orontes River: an area of 500,000 square meters that will include 5,000 housing units and 2,000 shops. But the old city, the heir to the urban settlement founded in 300 B.C. by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, which housed Antakya’s most precious monuments, lies to the east of the Orontes.

This area, a testament not only to a glorious past but also to a unique cultural blend shaped by Alevi, Arab, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, and Greek contributions, has seen little progress according to Middle East Eye. Furkan Demirci, president of the Turkey Design Council, estimates the cost of reconstruction at $1 billion - an amount clearly underestimated, as insiders suggest that a budget at least ten times greater is necessary for the full rebuilding of the urban center, which still resembles a war zone. The municipality, together with architect Bunyamin Derman and the British firm Foster and Partners, is modifying the layout of Antakya into a polycentric open city rather than a single-core plan. Some say these changes are partly a forced choice due to the impossibility of restoring the old layout, as many of the old buildings were never properly registered.

Work is underway, with key representatives of civil society, on the creation of a Memory Map of old Antakya, in an effort to reconstruct the memories, colors, and sounds of the city that once was. In recent weeks, help from archaeology has also been requested. The extensive archive of photographs, maps, and survey data from archaeological excavations carried out between 1932-39 by the Princeton University team under the direction of George W. Elderkin is currently under review by the architects of the Turkey Design Council: essential research, but which will inevitably further prolong reconstruction timelines and increase overall costs. Another five years may be needed to make the city livable again with a minimum level of economic recovery - and perhaps twice that time for the full revitalization of an area no smaller than 30 square kilometers.


NP March 2025
Claudio Monge