The unspeakable loss of Gaziantep's glorious heritage

Last summer, when my wife and I reached the Turkish city of Gaziantep, the challenge of architectural conservation in a region prone to severe earthquakes was the last thing on our minds. After a sun-scorched journey of more than 2,500 miles from the UK, the urgent preservation of our 66-year-old car, rather than the 2,000-year-old castle looming magnificently over the town, was the only problem we could think about.

Five months later, much of the castle, whose most ancient parts are thought to date back to the Hittite Empire 4,000 years ago, lies in ruins, a monumental victim of the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake whose epicentre was close to Gaziantep. "Before" and "After" photos of the castle, now shorn of several bastions, reveal the dreadful scale of the devastation.

In terms of cultural heritage, Gaziantep Castle is only the most visible casualty of this natural disaster. Sadly, it is by no means alone. The city’s 17th century Sirvani Mosque has also been badly damaged. In Diyarbakir, home to the high-walled fortress and Hevsel Gardens, a precious palimpsest of Roman, Sassanid, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman history, and a Unesco World Heritage Site, a number of buildings have also collapsed. Just as the tragic death toll of over 40,000 in Turkey and Syria rises daily, so we should expect further stories of physical destruction to emerge in the coming days. Antakya’s old city district, for instance, appears to have been completely ravaged.

Experts from Unesco and other cultural organisations are now working on inventory and damage assessment and recovery, and supporting efforts to safeguard critical sites to prevent looting and additional damage. While ancient sites such as Cyrene in Libya, Babylon and Mosul in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria have all suffered from wartime looting and terrorism in recent years, natural disasters equally create favourable conditions for theft.

Earthquakes make no distinction between buildings. It matters not whether they are second-century fortresses or 21st century apartment blocks. In Turkey, recriminations are already flying over the question of why so many modern buildings collapsed.

What hope is there for ancient monuments if a modern economy like Turkey is unable even to build earthquake-resistant buildings today? So much for the earthquake tax and the obligatory steel reinforcements in new buildings, which appear to have been notable by their absence. And if Turkey emerges from this disaster with serious questions to answer, what about neighbouring Syria, where the requirements of architectural conservation have been relegated to almost quaint irrelevance against the backdrop of a civil war?

In Aleppo, one of the world’s most ancient continuously inhabited cities, the mighty citadel, which withstood the plundering Turkic conqueror Timur in 1400, among other disasters, has also sustained significant damage.

As the dust literally settles on this epic scene of destruction across Turkey and northern Syria, there will be fierce scrutiny of the preparedness of both countries. While the loss of human life is always the greatest tragedy, the loss of cultural patrimony also leaves deep wounds. We all ask, how much of this destruction was avoidable?

Yet none of this is new. Sir Bernard Feilden, the respected British conservation architect who worked on monuments ranging from the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China to St Paul’s Cathedral in London and the Al Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem, wrote authoritatively on the challenges of conservation in earthquake-prone regions. Published in 1987, his 100-page handbook, Between Two Earthquakes: Cultural Property in Seismic Zones, should be essential reading for any professional engaged in this field.

His recommendations are worth revisiting. To the non-professional, some are basic common sense. Make inventories of all cultural resources, supported by photographs and outline drawings. Educate the public on the importance of historic buildings (would the Taliban have destroyed Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 had they been better educated?). Create a national or regional emergency group for the protection of cultural property.

Others, such as the need to commission geological, seismic and vulnerability surveys and studies, are less feasible in a war zone like Syria. Yet for Turks surveying the carnage around them, the recommendation to “Train architects and engineers in seismic resistant design and inspection for historic buildings” will sound horribly relevant to modern buildings, some of which have failed catastrophically, and with fatal consequences, due to the corrupt nexus between property developers and political authorities.

There is an inevitable tendency, with an earthquake on this vast scale, to view disaster as apocalypse. For the multitude of human lives lost, this is surely right. But when it comes to the built environment, perhaps we should not be too fatalistic.

History is full of examples of destruction followed by phoenix-like rebirth. Turkey itself can draw comfort from an inspiring story of post-earthquake recovery with the 17th century Yeni Mosque in Malatya, a serial victim of natural disasters. First destroyed in the 1894 "Great Earthquake", it was subsequently restored by Sultan Abdulhamid II. In 1964, it was hammered by another quake, only to be rebuilt. Today it lies in ruins, smashed by the 6 February earthquake, but we can – we must – be confident that once again it will live up to its name – New Mosque – and survive to fight another day.

Stories of earthquakes and the destruction they bring in their wake have transfixed humans from the dawn of time. In the Bible’s Book of Revelation (16: 18–19), God’s final outpouring of wrath against a sinful earth takes the form of a pulverising earthquake. “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed.”

Today more cities have collapsed and we are reminded that among the many lessons we learn from history is this: we do not learn lessons from history. If we did, then perhaps the terrible loss of human life and the annihilating damage to Turkey and Syria’s cultural heritage would never have happened on this scale. “Lessons must be learnt continually and we must always be aware that we live Between Two Earthquakes,” Feilden warned. “It still gives us the chills that, sooner or later, an earthquake like that is going to strike Istanbul,” a Turkish friend messages me: “What’s the government doing to prepare for that?”

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