Amid quake’s destruction, spirit of unity lives on in this Turkish city

“Antakya. Antakya. Antakya.” Yakup Cemal repeats the name of his hometown as he clutches his heart with his fists. It comes out more like a wail than the spoken word. 

Mr. Cemal, who is 78 and nearly blind, was displaced from Antakya after living through two catastrophic earthquakes Feb. 6 that ruptured the land across southern Turkey and northern Syria.

The first of the quakes devastated Antakya, but he and his wife of 57 years survived in their bedroom. Their home was left uninhabitable, and they lost their synagogue, their street, their neighbors. In all, over 50,000 people died, with Antakya among the worst hit, and most agree the official toll is a vast undercount. Once known as Antioch, Antakya has been a crossroads of civilizations for over two millennia. Today it sits in nearly complete ruins.

When Mr. Cemal talks about his childhood home, with its courtyard at the center, and about growing up so easily among Christians, Muslims, and Jews, his wife hands him a napkin to wipe his eyes. “Even though we are different, we share a common culture,” he says. “I only hope my life lasts long enough so that I can return home.”

Just as much as he longs for home, his home needs him. At the time of the earthquake, Mr. Cemal was one of only 13 Jews left in Antakya. The Jewish community’s president and his wife died in the quake, and the rest were evacuated – bringing to a close the continuous practice of Judaism here for nearly 2,500 years. Mr. Cemal, now in Istanbul, is not alone in asking, how will the spirit of coexistence that defines modern Antakya be altered by the quake?

Six months since the destruction, a grief hangs in air still thick with the dust of rubble, and immediate recovery turns to the long road to reconstruction. Many religious communities, civil society groups, and business leaders are focusing their attention on not just the physical city but the spirit of harmony that marks Antakya – at a time when that kind of unity feels out of reach in so many parts of Turkey and beyond.

“The world is getting more multicultural, despite the policies to stop it,” says Anna Maria Beylunioğlu. She is part of an online cultural platform called Nehna, which, she says, means “us” in Arabic. Originally founded to educate about Arabic-speaking Christians in Antakya, it has now pivoted to preserving the city’s multicultural memory. “People are moving, and we are constantly faced with different cultures in different contexts. So we have to learn how to live together,” she says. “And this idea of a mosaic in Antioch, even if sometimes exaggerated, is a reference point for the world.”

To see the destruction here is to be overwhelmed by scale. In swaths, hardly anything is left standing in the once bustling city of 400,000. Six months since the quake, almost no homes have been rebuilt and no services, like water or sewer, have been restored. The residential west side of the Orontes River is defined by emptiness, save constant police patrols where entire apartment blocks collapsed and are being razed. In their place are gaping lots with nothing except scatterings of former life: leather shoes, children’s umbrellas, kitchen plates. Everyone here knows someone who died. It’s not uncommon for people to know dozens of people who died.

Across the affected regions, which include 11 Turkish provinces like Hatay, whose capital is Antakya, more than 313,000 buildings were destroyed. The United Nations Development Program says the total volume of rubble equals 100 million cubic meters, 10 times more than the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The Turkish government estimates damage will exceed $103 billion, representing a ninth of Turkey’s 2022 gross domestic product.

At least 3.3 million people were displaced across the region. Those who have stayed in Antakya are living in the minority of homes without damage or in shipping containers if they are fortunate. The worst off are in tent cities, many of them informal, erected on sidewalks or empty blocks, the skeletons of standing buildings casting shadows around them.

For these residents, the focus remains on daily survival. Hüsne Bekler, a mother of two children under age 2, is living in a tent set up on a former residential block that was razed and cleared. Her elder child, Elizan, plays in the dirt with a spoon. Her main preoccupations, she says, are swatting mosquitoes away from the children and using the bathroom at night. “May no one ever have to experience this,” she says.

In the face of such basic needs, it can feel frivolous to prioritize the cultural heritage of ancient Antioch. But it’s also a way to channel grief in the course of rebuilding lives, says Emir Çekmecelioğlu, who lost two of his closest friends and his uncle, aunt, and 12-year-old cousin. “We lost our friends; we lost our families,” says Mr. Çekmecelioğlu. “So we can’t lose the city, too.”

Antioch was founded as an ancient Greek city in 300 B.C. and has been ruled by an array of empires and occupiers ever since. After 300 years, it became the Roman province of Syria – a center of religion, politics, and learning where Roman emperors wintered. In A.D. 637, it came under Muslim control. Later, the city was part of the Ottoman Empire. When that empire broke up following World War I, it was controlled by a French mandate as part of Syria until Turkey annexed it in 1939.

Antioch was always a crossroads linking Asia to the Mediterranean along the historic Silk Road. Many of its citizens speak Arabic as easily as Turkish. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all found a home in Antioch since late antiquity. It’s considered a “cradle of Christianity,” the place in the New Testament where “Christians” were first named.

The Greek orator Libanius declared in the fourth century of Antioch, “If a man had the idea of traveling all over the earth, not to see how cities looked, but to learn their ways, our city would fulfill his purpose and save him his journeying.”

Modern Antakya, with its warm climate and fertile land, is marked by tolerance, apparent in everything from its cuisine to the religious heritage imprinted in the old city – all of which today is gone. Down the street from the Cemals’ empty synagogue, its doors shuttered after the Torah scrolls were saved, stands the centuries-old Habib-i Neccar Mosque, once a church and later considered the first Muslim place of worship in Anatolia, which constitutes most of modern-day Turkey. The toppled finial of the minaret dangles over the standing walls.

A few blocks away is the Greek Orthodox church, which had been rebuilt after an 1872 earthquake and collapsed completely again Feb. 6. To access it today requires climbing over three mounds of jagged rubble. After making the trek, one finds nothing more than a desolate patio with a tent and chairs. The church’s cross, recovered from the wreckage, is propped up against the ruins.

“The many different religious groups have been living together for a long time, and together we have suffered,” says Dimitri Doğum, head priest of the Antakya Greek Orthodox Church. His parish lost 40 members out of 1,200. Echoing many residents, he says the world has forgotten them. “There are many other cities that have been destroyed by this earthquake, but Antakya needs special attention because it’s an example worldwide.”

That’s not to say there weren’t and aren’t tensions here – between Sunni and Alawite Muslims, or among different Christian communities, or across religions in general. Antakya might celebrate its religious diversity, but Turkey itself is riven by political ideologies under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the earthquake region is no exception. 

Recently there has also been a backlash against Syrian refugees, since that country’s civil war has pushed millions fleeing the conflict into Turkey. Days before Turkey’s presidential election in May, candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who lost to Mr. Erdoğan, arrived in Antakya – just 20 miles from the Syrian border – to capitalize on anti-Syrian sentiment, saying he’d like to “show them the door.”

Some question whether Antakya’s cultural diversity can be restored. Emre Erdoğan, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University, says that with symbolic buildings devastated, attracting the religious communities who were attached to them will be difficult. “All these people will be replaced by ‘average’ Turks who are looking for new opportunities,” he says.

But if history is a guide, hope outweighs pessimism regarding the city’s multicultural future. Antakya has been destroyed repeatedly by war, crusades, and natural disasters. Several massive earthquakes have collapsed the city throughout history, including one in 526, considered among the worst on record, that killed 250,000.

“I deeply believe that the city will come back, and it’s not just some kind of banal optimism. It’s really the history of the city that basically tells us that no matter how devastated it is, it will recover,” says Andrea U. De Giorgi, co-author of “Antioch: A History.” “And the folks in Antakya have been real upholders of this idea that this is a place where all this can coexist.”

Now, a new crop of citizen activists has emerged to defend that idea. 

Civil society almost always reveals a resilience and generosity of spirit in disasters, according to Rebecca Solnit in her book “A Paradise Built in Hell,” which synthesizes decades of literature on disaster reconstruction from the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 to 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While many fear that “in disaster we become something other than we normally are,” she writes, whether that be helpless or bestial and savage, we ultimately “remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within.”

In the early days after the destruction, Turks organized pop-up kitchens, provided shelter to strangers, and delivered food, hygiene products, tents, and clothing donated from across the country. Those with no relation at all to Hatay left their jobs and traveled for days to come help.

But the cultural heritage of Antakya adds a complex layer to reconstruction.

Ayhan Kara recalls the “horrifying noise” of buildings collapsing, like crashing waves. After surviving, he filmed the destroyed city for eight hours, gathering evidence, he says, of the faulty construction blamed for the scale of the tragedy. When rescue crews failed to arrive in the earliest days, he, like so many locals, tried to reach those buried under rubble with his bare hands. On day 10, after the funerals of his relatives, he says, he called surviving friends and contacts and founded a new nongovernmental organization called Hatay – Our Common Concern.

It’s a platform of lawyers, artists, local businesspeople, and historians demanding that when Antakya is rebuilt, it is not just constructed in a practical sense but with the spirit of coexistence at its core. The group’s logo includes the symbols of the three Abrahamic faiths. 

“You stare at those ruins, and it is easier to go away and settle down and forget about us,” Mr. Kara says. “We know that we lost a lot. But the soul of Hatay is somewhere there, so we should catch it.” Mr. Kara has collected rubble and refashioned it as the new ceiling for his office in the local bus company he runs. “If we lose the soul, we lose everything,” he adds.

In the days after the earthquakes, President Erdoğan, running for reelection, promised to rebuild housing within months – universally considered not only unachievable but also far too fast to be safe or to safeguard different areas’ history and culture. It put residents of Antakya on the defensive.

On April 6, when authorities were trying to clear rubble, including what many locals feared were remains of historic buildings that could never be recovered, Mr. Kara joined activists who formed a human chain to stop them.

Mr. Çekmecelioğlu, a research assistant in architecture at Mustafa Kemal University, is a member of Hatay – Our Common Concern and created a subgroup of about 20 people that has dubbed itself The Volunteer Conservationists. They took turns in clusters of three or four protecting sites from the bulldozers that work daily clearing the town. 

On a spring day in the centuries-old Long Bazaar, riddled with rubble and puddles, he smiles widely as he takes a photo of a man painting a wall in off-white. Weeks earlier, The Volunteer Conservationists stopped authorities from clearing rubble and likely damaging that wall in the process – one side of a jeweler’s store that has been there for decades. “It’s a small sign of hope,” he says, referring to the fresh coat of paint.

Now these activists, many of whom only met because of the earthquake, are organizing conferences and meetings and networking with historians, urban planners, and archaeologists as the future of the city takes center stage.

The central government has hired a lead architect to draw up preliminary blueprints for rebuilding Antakya. They include such ideas as tearing down the homes along the banks of the Orontes River, where the foundation is essentially riverbed, and creating parkland in their place. Another idea involves moving residents into various satellites outside the city center and dispersing cultural and administrative entities to entice residents to new locations.

The government has pledged to rebuild the historic core, but what’s still under discussion is whether residents will – or should – return to it. Mehmet Güzelmansur, a member of the National Assembly for the opposition Republican People’s Party in Hatay province, says he supports a plan to rebuild the historic core but move citizens out of it, since it runs along one of the world’s most active fault lines.

For Tuğçe Tezer, an urban planner whose Ph.D. focuses on Antakya, the historic center must also include the residents or else the city will become nothing more than a museum. “For the 10 years that I’ve been studying Antakya, I’ve noticed the same man every day in the same seat at a cafe in the same gray suit,” Dr. Tezer says. “If we can’t manage to keep him there, it’s no longer Antakya.”

She has no idea if he survived, though, she adds later.

As the future cityscape of Antakya is debated, a looming concern is that, no matter how it reemerges, residents will stay away. Many fled to live with relatives in Istanbul, Ankara, Mersin, or other cities in the region where they are establishing roots.

But the business community sees a role for itself in drawing them back. On the outskirts of the city, Abud Abdo, the CEO of textile manufacturer Hateks, the largest private employer in Antakya, has built 120 container homes on company property to house employees. (He employed 750 before the earthquake; 80 died and several hundred have moved away.) Farmer Elif Ovalı is trying to create opportunities for local producers to export to larger markets outside Hatay. Her farm is also used as a much-needed gathering place, where ideas like a new “container restaurant” have sprung up.

Hikmet Çinçin, the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya, says the organization has not surveyed its 10,000 members to know how many survived. But he knows many blue- and white-collar workers have left, including many with small businesses like key-makers or painters who “sustain life,” he says, and whom the city needs if it is to recover.

But the act of rebuilding is more complicated than starting at zero; it’s starting at unimaginable loss. Ethem Selçuk has worked for his family business, making cheeses and tomato pastes and growing olives, since he was 7 years old. He and his siblings grew up in their shop in the heart of the Long Bazaar, a place he calls “magical” for its embodiment of Antakyan coexistence.

On Feb. 6, his store collapsed. His parents both died in the earthquake. So did his only brother, with whom he ran the business, and his only sister. His staff of seven either died or moved away. He was left alone. “In the early days, I considered abandoning it,” he says. “The pain is too big; it’s too large.” But his daughter, Gülendam, urged him to continue working, says Mr. Selçuk, with a gentle smile as he puts his arm around her.

“He was so sad,” Gülendam Selçuk explains. “And he loved his job. I thought this is the only way he will overcome his grief.”

Now she, an architect, and his son, a dentist, are helping him reestablish the business on their family farm in the hills outside the city, along with assistance from a nephew in medical school. They focus on accepting the small blessings. “He is working less, so now we can have breakfast together on Sunday mornings,” Ms. Selçuk says.

Mr. Selçuk is like many residents who are driven by a sense of responsibility to those they lost and to the city they love. Outside the city center, a new Long Bazaar, dubbed the “container bazaar,” has been erected. Sales are scant, with just one or two customers a day, says Mehmet Özkan, a graphic designer working in a friend’s shop selling kömbe, a typical cookie from the region. “All of us are homeless; nobody is living here. So it’s not easy,” he says. “But I’m here because this is my city. I was born here, and I will live here.”

Every building on his street, in the modern section west of the Orontes River, came down except his, which, although still standing, is uninhabitable. “We are angry. We are asking ourselves, ‘Why did this happen? Why are we still living?’ But we are the lucky ones. We are living.”

Rebuilding, restarting, returning are, at once, the hardest tasks and the easiest.

Adnan Fatihoğlu’s mosque is in ruins. But the local imam of the Alawite branch of Islam, which made up a significant portion of the population of Hatay, sits on a bench outside a container now serving as his office near the mosque to talk about how Antakya moves forward.

Initially he went to Ankara with his wife. Now back, he is connecting with dispersed members of the mosque over Facebook. Some have found homes far away; others are living in tent cities and containers nearby. He urges them all to return when they can. He’s under no illusion. “The next 10 years are going to be very difficult,” he says.

He waves to Ayhan Yoğurtçuoğlu, a tire repairman who lives a few blocks away and joins the imam on his bench. Mr. Yoğurtçuoğlu moved in with a brother in Istanbul after the quake but only for the first two months. “It’s like I came running back to Antakya,” he says. “The hardest part is having nowhere to gather, but we will start from scratch.”

“As if we are newly born,” adds the imam.

In fact, despite the surrounding destruction, a slice of the quotidian begins to take shape as the sun sets. A group of women sits on the remnants of front steps. Others have set up folding chairs on the street, and together they share a meal. In an undamaged apartment complex across the street, a man is reading on his balcony.

Amid this scene, many things are different. More men have returned. Without schools or leisure spaces and with basic services still interrupted, women and children have stayed away. And aftershocks continue to convulse the earth. “But our tradition of living together won’t be lost forever,” says the imam.

It simply can’t be, says Mr. Cemal, from afar in Istanbul.

Mr. Cemal’s daughter Soli, who took in her parents, says it’s painful to watch them suffer. “You’d think it would get easier as time goes on, but the pain has only deepened for him,” she says.

He has lost 14 kilos (31 pounds), unable to eat or sleep. Dressed in a blue cardigan over a crisp button-down shirt, he talks for a long while about his life, how he met his wife while buying fabric for his father’s clothing shop, which he later took over. Mr. Cemal says even though only a dozen Jews were living in Antakya, he never felt like he was in a minority group. “We have always been there, and our grandparents before that, and their grandparents before that,” he says, clasping worry beads in his hand.

“It was such a civilization. There is no place like it in the world,” he says. “I will not give up on Antakya.”