The Devastating 1999 Izmit Earthquake: A Tragedy That Shaped Turkey’s Future

How the state intentionally suppressed the warnings and ignored the lessons from the Marmara temblor a generation ago Share

The man is standing in front of the debris, weeping rather than sobbing. He occasionally roars like an injured animal. At one point, he leaps into the air and slams his feet down in a display of intense emotion. He swings his feet back and forth as if dancing, holding a bright red piece of clothing and pressing it to his face to breathe in the aroma. The man sifts desperately through the debris, gathering anything that still bears their smell, picking up a tiny jacket, and yelling incoherent words at the jagged shards on the ground while others stand nearby in helpless silence. He has lost his daughter, son-in-law and grandson.

The artist Anil Olcan wrote, “I keep repeating to myself, ‘the horror, the horror, the horror,'” after visiting Hatay, the worst-hit area in the 10-city-wide zone of devastation in southern Turkey. He found that one word could not adequately describe what he had witnessed. Is there a word in Turkish that describes how fear of dying, chaos, panic, and the struggle to survive are intertwined?

Following the deadliest earthquake to ever strike the country almost two months ago, an indescribable trauma has overtaken Turkish society. Its roots are deep. The English school in Istanbul advised me not to bring up specific subjects with my students when I first started working there in 2006. This included the usual forbidden taboos, such as the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish conflict, but also earthquakes.

“Don’t even say the word,” a colleague said to me. This rekindled the fear of another earthquake and touched the still-open wound of the state abandoning people when things needed most.

Turkey, a country cursed by geology, is one of the most earthquake-prone regions on the planet. In almost every region of the nation, the earth trembles due to the media’s constant insistence that Turkey is a “deprem ulkesi,” or “earthquake country.” It is perilously balanced on the Anatolian tectonic plate, which is being compressed and twisted counterclockwise by the African, Arabian, and Eurasian plates. This results in the creation of not one, but two lengthy, extremely active fault lines that span the entirety of the country’s north as well as a large portion of its south and east. Over the past century, Turkey has experienced at least a dozen significant earthquakes that have claimed over 1,000 lives. However, even prior to the most recent quakes in the south, there was one in particular that caused immense collective trauma, shattering society’s confidence in the government and laying the foundation for Turkish civil society.

It unfolded one hot and muggy night, when the sea was calm and the stars bright. It was Aug. 17, 1999, at precisely 3:02 a. m. When I interviewed the residents, they told me that they woke up to the sound of “a roar” or “a strong wind,” depending on who you ask, in the breezy bayside town of Değirmendere. İrem Aydemir, who was 7 years old then, said it sounded “more like a beehive. Before she knew what was going on, her mother had snatched her up from the bed at her aunt’s house, where they were staying, and she and her cousins had hurried out onto the street. İrem looked around and realized that nothing was as it should be. Trees were in the middle of the sea. Some of the buildings were missing. Neighbors were standing outside in dead silence, women draped in tablecloths and curtains to cover themselves. In another part of her town, people awoke with a start to discover their houses filled with seawater, complete with fish and mussels floating around. Initially, some believed that a meteorite had struck, others that a war had broken out, and still others believed that the end of the world had come.

Situated just 50 miles southeast of Istanbul, Değirmendere is well-known for its international arts events, hazelnut festival, sweet cherries, giant plane tree-lined seaside park, and waterfront lined with tea houses, seafood restaurants, and ice cream shops. Tucked away in Kocaeli’s Izmit Bay, a densely populated industrial province between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara to the north, Değirmendere is a military town because Gölcük, a nearby town, is home to Turkey’s largest naval base, which employs 24,000 people. As a result, it is seen as modern and secular; women can stroll around in shorts without fear of harassment, and young people sipping beer can flirt and look out into the chilly Marmara. Like other Turkish coastal areas, İrem grew up close to the “sahil,” or seaside, which is practically sacred and the foundation of a whole way of life.

The epicenter of the earthquake — a devastating 7. Only a few miles away was a 4 magnitude earthquake that rocked Kocaeli for 45 seconds, releasing the equivalent of 236 Hiroshima blasts and causing a tsunami as high as 8 feet to flood more than 100 yards inland. The last significant earthquake to rock the area was in 1894, so much time had passed that many people were either unaware of or had rarely given much thought to the fact that they had chosen to live right on top of one of the planet’s most active fault lines.

Just across the bay, Turkey’s biggest oil refinery was engulfed in a massive conflagration that was shooting dark smoke nearly 200 feet into the air. Minarets snapped like matchsticks. Buildings crumbled like sandcastles, for indeed they were made from concrete mixed with sand from the beach. The people who came out of their houses in their pajamas, drenched in cement dust, and comatose will always be referred to as “depremzede” or “earthquake victims.” ”.

Bahar Topçu, 13, a typical middle-class teen, was staying the night at her aunt and uncle’s apartment at the end of the bay in nearby Izmit. She took swimming lessons in the neighborhood pool, studied ballet and piano, passed hours drinking tea and telling stories to her friends, and dreamed of relocating to Istanbul to pursue her studies in international relations. She cherished the fact that you could easily run into familiar faces in the middle of the small town, and everyone had a favorite greengrocer, butcher, and baker with whom to share the day’s gossip.

Bahar struggled to stay upright as the ground shook for what felt like an eternity. She couldn’t straighten her legs. Her instinct was to flee, to find a way out, but there is nowhere to go when the ground is trembling. Bahar was wrenched into the doorway by her older cousin as they frantically ran into her room and held onto each other for dear life.

When it finally stopped, they went downstairs with her aunt and uncle and gathered in a kids’ park with their neighbors. Miraculously, this neighborhood was built on hard ground, and none of the buildings was heavily damaged. Bahar had never seen Izmit covered in such complete darkness when the electricity was out, and she had never felt the presence of the salty sea in the air. Everyone stood there in stunned silence.

Bahar asked herself, “Should I cry? Should I run? What should I do?” as she worried about her parents who lived in a different neighborhood. But soon they arrived by car, shouting her name, overjoyed to find her safe and sound. They drove away, passing through neighborhoods that looked starkly different from their own. Their headlights illuminated the rubble of ghostly buildings crumbled along silent, empty streets. At that moment, the family could not fathom where all the people were.

Finding a pay phone to call Bahar’s sister Pinar, who was studying in France, and let her know they were okay before she woke up and saw the news, was their only concern. When they finally found one, her mother realized she didn’t know a word of French and called Pinar’s facility. She said, “Pinar’s momma, Turkey,” and the person on the other end enthusiastically answered in a lengthy stream of French. “Mama — bonne. Papa — bon,” (“Mama — good. Papa — good”) was all she could manage, a story they would recount many times in the future.

People listened to news reports on the radio through open car doors while sitting on the ground in Değirmendere. When İrem’s dad, who was at their home in a different neighborhood, tried to get through to them, he found it difficult because everyone was stopping him and pleading for assistance in getting their loved ones out. Afterwards, he would spend weeks excavating his wife’s cousin’s body beneath the debris, whose wedding ring served as her only means of identification. The bodies accumulated so fast that they had to use Izmit’s neighborhood skating rink as a temporary morgue.

After meeting them, İrem’s uncle, who was working a night shift at a glass factory, went home to his pregnant wife. However, the radio informed him that his neighborhood had been devastated before he left, and he passed out from shock and hopelessness. They gave him kolonya, the popular Turkish perfume, to help him wake up. Later, he learned that his future son and wife had spent the night at her mother’s house in a different neighborhood and had managed to survive.

Meanwhile, in Istanbul, 21-year-old university student Çağlar Akgüngör rushed to join the relief effort. Unlike almost everyone scrambling to help, he was trained and ready. Three years prior, he had become a member of AKUT, an organization started by one of the instructors at his university’s mountaineering club. AKUT was a trailblazing search and rescue organization founded to assist natural disaster victims, cave divers, and endangered rock climbers. Following a training session at the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute at Boğaziçi University, they became aware that Istanbul was situated on a major seismic zone and that Turkey lacked the necessary resources to cope with such a catastrophe. When municipalities demolished buildings, they let AKUT members practice working on the ruins.

Although Avcilar is 55 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, Akgüngör and his AKUT colleagues met there, in a coastal district on the European side of Istanbul, where the earthquake destroyed over 60 substandard buildings built on soft, sandy soil. Due to the lack of cellphone ownership and sporadic service, they communicated via radio. After discovering that the damage in Kocaeli was significantly worse, they immediately left for Gölcük.

Nothing could have prepared Akgüngör for the scenes of mayhem that met him there. Because portions of the ground had been liquefied by the temblor, some buildings appeared as though they had been swallowed by quicksand. Others lay completely intact but on their sides. Many buildings had been opened up like dollhouses, exposing frozen scenes of domestic life inside. In the worst places, a number of buildings were combined into a single, dust-covered mass of concrete, metal, furnishings, kitchen appliances, clothes, and curtains. Everyone was eager to help, but they lacked training, coordination and equipment. Akgüngör felt helpless and didn’t know where to begin as countless people pleaded with his team to save their loved ones. AKUT had no more than 50 members and 2,000 volunteers, and lacked heavy or specialized equipment.

Desperate residents tried to remove giant chunks of concrete with their bare hands. The naval base had taken a serious hit, and sailors were busily repairing their crumbling headquarters and exhuming hundreds of officers who had been buried after they had gathered for a celebration. Aside from the soldiers, the state was nowhere to be found.

Despite what appears to be the military’s recommendation, no state of emergency or martial law was declared, and there was no disaster management organization to organize a response. The state’s earthquake fund, established in 1972, was found to have just 1 million lira, then worth $2. The main fiber-optic cable linking Istanbul and Ankara was severed by the 78-mile-long fault rupture, leaving the government in the dark. Additionally, the highway and railways between the two cities were harmed. Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit attributed this to the delayed reaction, but he was unable to explain how outside rescuers and the media were able to get to the scene in a matter of hours.

“Is Ankara or America further away?” asked Mustafa Yılmaz, a state minister.

The corruption-riddled relief organization, Kizilay (Turkish Red Crescent), was absent for days. When it did arrive, the few tents it managed to gather were of low quality and leaked in the days that followed the earthquake, soaking the area. Four months later, a study discovered that only 10% of survivors said they had received assistance from any state agency, including the military, in the first few days after the earthquake.

People cried, “Where is the state?” into the numerous cameras that Turkey’s recently established private news broadcasters carried, managing to arrive ahead of government representatives.

Newspaper headlines were merciless: “The state is under the rubble”; “We’re victims of the state”; “The people abandoned. It was shocking to many in a society where many held the almost sacred “papa state” in high regard and were immune to criticism for its shortcomings.

In Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s oldest newspaper, Abdülkadir Yücelman wrote, “It’s not the Marmara that collapsed, but the system itself. Fatih Altayli stated in the newspaper Hürriyet that there was “below zero” trust in the state, cautioning that “the damage done to society by this lack of trust is far more destructive than the earthquake.” In response to those who were stifling criticism in order to maintain “national unity and solidarity,” Ömer Çelik, a future minister for the Justice and Development Party (AKP), wrote, “When those who can’t govern act like they can run this unmanageable mechanism, it costs thousands of lives.” ”.

Even the beloved military was no longer infallible, at least for a few days. “In the first two days the people searched for soldiers in vain,” wrote Can Atakli in Sabah. “The soldiers get everything and we get nothing,” a bitter woman screamed to a journalist from The Guardian.

Without an official rescue effort, a massive civilian mobilization never before seen in Turkey started in the early hours. Student organizations, Islamic charities, businesses, doctors, engineers, and regular citizens descended on the earthquake zone from all over Anatolia, schlepping supplies such as water, bread, canned food and boxed milk, clothing, cranes, and bulldozers. Subsequently, they offered soup kitchens, laundry services, eyeglasses, psychological support, and even legal assistance and media advocacy to give the victims a voice.

“The people are running towards the disaster zone without waiting for the state,” proclaimed Hürriyet’s front page. The TÜSİAD business association estimated that 10 million of Turkey’s 14 million households contributed aid.

Numerous organizations would later establish themselves, and the relief effort signaled a rebirth for Turkey’s fledgling and highly polarized civil society. This was largely orchestrated and funded by businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, 42, who hurried to Değirmendere to provide whatever assistance he could. Following the earthquake, Kavala committed his entire life to serving civil society, creating some of the most significant artistic and cultural institutions in Turkey. The 1999 relief effort brought together many of the most well-known activists, urban planners, and architects who would go on to play a significant role in the 2013 Gezi uprising, which was partially a protest against converting a designated meeting place in the event of an earthquake into a shopping mall.

Days ahead of state officials, foreign rescue teams—some of whom traveled over half the world—arrived with the specialized equipment and rescue dogs that Turkey lacked. The German daily, Bild, published its headline in Turkish: “Arkadaslar, Almanya acinizi paylasiyor” (“Friends, Germany shares your pain”). Greece, Turkey’s rival, gushed in its headlines, “We are all Turkish,” and “Mehmet, my brother, be brave,” as the mayor of Athens solicited donations and called for the removal of borders. ” Hürriyet responded with a headline in Greek: “Efharisto poli file” — “Thank you, neighbor. ” Later, when U. S. President Bill Clinton and his family visited the tent cities, children followed him in droves, shouting, “Uncle Clinton. ”.

The beliefs that Turks had been instilled with since elementary school, such as the notion that their nation was surrounded by enemies and that “a Turk’s friend is a Turk” and that citizens should put the state before themselves, gradually came to an end.

“We always thought that the only friends of Turks were Turks. We know now that we were manipulated,” proclaimed Tourism Minister Erkan Mumcu. “We should open our society to the world. ”.

A sense of unending optimism spread, and observers likened the scene to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The journalist Orhan Bursali exclaimed in Cumhuriyet, “The earthquake is the starting point for the establishment of a new mentality, a new spirit, a modern new administrative, scientific and technical vision for all of Turkey.”

A woman approached President Süleyman Demirel after he had finally visited the devastated areas and insisted that it was not the appropriate time to assign blame, saying, “The ones left under the rubble are my loved ones.” ” She was promptly removed by officials. Demirel insisted on the state’s “mighty power” and “omnipotence,” referred to the earthquake as “fate” and a “act of God,” and berated those who “demeaned” it. Hürriyet fired back: “It wasn’t fate. It was a crime. ”.

Demirel insisted that “nobody estimated when, where and [to which degree] such kinds of disasters would happen. In actuality, scientists noted in a prominent journal that “the port city of Izmit is most vulnerable to an earthquake” two years prior to the earthquake. “Is Kocaeli Ready for an Earthquake?” was the title of a conference held in Kocaeli just months before the earthquake. If the answer wasn’t obvious already, local and international media quickly went to work exposing the appalling quality of almost all of the most damaged buildings.

Construction experts told the Los Angeles Times that “virtually all” of the collapsed buildings weren’t up to code. According to the New York Times, a startling amount of the crumbling structures were constructed within the previous five years. A disgruntled police chief in Eskişehir, roughly 75 miles from the epicenter, said of a seven-story structure that collapsed and entombed 27 people, “made completely from sand and soil.” ”.

National guidelines for earthquake-resistant construction were first established in 1944 in the wake of the devastating Erzincan earthquake of 1939, and they have since been revised multiple times. Contractors broke the law by cutting corners, forgoing soil tests, and adding stories to buildings at the behest of politicians willing to accept bribes to turn a blind eye. They could even use the infamous “construction amnesties” to hocus-pocus their shoddy buildings into legality by paying a fee to the government. ”.

The public was livid. “Murderers,” ran a blistering Hürriyet headline. Furious mobs stoned the homes of corrupt builders. The media directed its ire at one in particular. Dubbed the “death contractor,” Veli Göçer (whose last name means “collapses”) constructed 500 of the crumbling structures in Yalova using concrete mixed with leftover garbage and sea sand. In an interview at the time, he denied any guilt, claiming to be a literature graduate with no experience in construction: “I’m a poet, not a structural engineer.” He was the only contractor to go to prison, serving seven and a half years of an eighteen-year sentence, out of 2,100 lawsuits filed against him. He opened a new construction firm in 2018.

Authorities were quick to place the blame on contractors but became defensive when criticism was leveled at them by the public. Kanal 6, a critical broadcaster, was shut down temporarily by Ankara after it was accused of “inciting hatred among the public towards the state.” Ecevit stated that nobody had the right to “hurt the feelings” of state officials and cautioned the media against “demoralizing” coverage. The governor of Bolu actually slapped an earthquake victim who criticized him.

Chief of Staff Hüseyin Kivrikoğlu held a press conference three days after the earthquake, during which he chastised the media for their critical coverage and for failing to feature his 53,000 soldiers in the region. At the very least, the media dutifully changed its tone overnight, at least toward the military, and the old red lines were promptly reestablished.

However, none was as ruthless as the ultranationalist Health Minister Osman Durmuş, who insisted that Turks should not accept Greek blood donated and rejected aid from the US and other foreign nations (especially Armenia) because they “do not suit our culture.” Instead, he told survivors they could use mosque restrooms and wash in the sea.

“I take being called ignorant and racist as a compliment,” he sneered during a press conference. Durmuş even accused other non-state relief workers of “putting on a show” and threatened to press charges against AKUT, the heroes of the relief effort who saved 200 lives. ” On Aug. 24, one week following the earthquake, he awoke to an adamant Hürriyet headline that was specifically addressed to him: “Shut up.” ”.

When nearly no survivors remained to be rescued by the fourth day, the state finally began to plan its response. “Finally,” read Hürriyet’s sardonic headline. However, Ankara decided to take total control of the aid in order to restore public trust in the government, allowing only NGOs that support the state to carry on with operations in the region. Religious, leftist and human rights NGOs were kicked out, their water shut off, their bank accounts frozen. Several NGOs, including AKUT, were investigated for accepting foreign aid. Given that evidence was thrown into the sea, the Ministry of Public Works declined to permit the TMMOB union of architects and engineers to inspect the damaged buildings.

The actual extent of the destruction was determined after the rescue operations were completed and the foreign teams returned home: 365,000 damaged buildings, more than 110,000 of which were severely damaged or collapsed. A quarter of a million people were left without a place to live, with some of them spending up to ten years in prefabricated homes. No one seemed to take the government’s death tolls seriously. “These numbers are not convincing,” future President Abdullah Gül told the press. A 2010 parliamentary commission later put the figure at 18,373, with a further 5,840 missing. Many experts believe that the figure is much higher, and a study from 2004 estimated that the toll was, at minimum, $245,000. The study’s confidence level was 90%.

The collective trauma left on Turkish society by the Marmara quake never disappeared.

“Society became more anxious; a sense of loneliness entered people’s lives. Individuals and groups experienced fragmentation and a rise in insecurity, according to an email from psychotherapist Deniz Altinay to New Lines. Studies put the PTSD rates among the survivors as high as 76%.

Following the earthquake, constant aftershocks terrified not only Kocaeli but the entire city of Istanbul in the weeks and months that followed. Some jumped from their balconies for fear their building would collapse. Many slept outdoors. Because the earthquake happened at 3:02 a. m. millions of people resisted going to sleep until after that point, a phenomenon known as the “3:02 syndrome,” according to AKUT rescue worker Akgüngör. “In Istanbul, we’d go out at 2, 3 in the morning in October, November 1999. We’d look around and all the lights would be on,” he told me.

İrem, an anthropology doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, still experiences panic attacks in which she claims to feel the ground move. Her mother experienced periods of fainting for fifteen years after having to prepare her own cousin’s body for the funeral in 1999. Many who survived feel guilty.

Değirmendere was never the same afterward.

“I always felt like a piece of the town was gone, and a part of me was gone,” İrem remarked. Much of the population left. After the tsunami, a sea-worshiping people became traumatized by the water. The sea swallowed much of the coastline and never gave it back. After an AKP candidate for mayor was elected in 2004, the party embarked on a massive building binge, covering deep wounds with concrete.

“I guess people thought that’s how we’ll heal our wounds. Not with any accountability, but by building stuff,” İrem said. “But we were never healed because we never found justice. ”.

The scholar Gönül Tol was close to the earthquake zone on February 19, 1999, and took part in the relief effort while still a university student. 6 of this year, where she lost family members after no state rescue workers showed up for days. She recalls hoping that after 1999, things would change, but she claims that this time, the response from institutions that have been hollowed out is much worse. Earthquakes are inevitable, but the real catastrophe is one-person rule.

Her voice quivered with fury as she recounted the identical series of spiraling institutional breakdowns from 1999, amplified and rendered worse by the consolidation of power under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “At least before, the government and state were different entities. Now, one man has become everything,” she said. “You see agency after agency, official after official, just frozen, waiting for orders from Erdoğan. ” The stronger his rule becomes, the less capable he is of governing.

Turkey’s media is hardly what it once was, giving in to the government almost entirely and having very little freedom to report critically. Erdoğan himself has become the living personification of the ostensibly infallible, sacrosanct state. Experts, including many of the most well-known individuals involved in the 1999 earthquake relief effort and the 2013 Gezi protests, are being imprisoned by the government instead of being ignored. These individuals include the architect Mücella Yapici, the philanthropist Kavala, and Tayfun Kahraman, the former head of Istanbul’s Department of Earthquake Risk Management and Urban Improvement.

Writer Orhan Pamuk wrote about how deep the rot runs that caused such needless destruction following the 1999 earthquake. It was far too likely that the politicians, state representatives, and mayors who accepted bribes, who were being decried, would seek office once more and win over these voters. Additionally, it was possible that the individuals voicing such strong complaints had previously bought off the city council with bribes in order to get around the building codes, and they would have thought it foolish not to have done so. ”.

It’s too early to say what the repercussions of the Feb. 6 earthquakes will be, or if any lessons will be learned this time. Natural disaster expert İrem compared an earthquake to opening Pandora’s box, revealing all of a society’s hidden or unspoken issues. She finds it difficult to observe how nations like Chile and Japan are changing and adapting their cities to withstand earthquakes. “And then look at us. It’s not fair. ”.

Bahar, a graduate student studying anthropology at Leuven University in Belgium, observed that most people in Izmit soon stopped discussing earthquake preparations. She recalled that politicians discussed it for a few years before ceasing, adding, “People didn’t care.”

The pattern is usually the same, according to Akgüngör, who chose to study disaster management and wrote a dissertation about Turkey’s historical responses to earthquakes: the state responds poorly at first, criticism pours in, the response gets better, and the criticism eventually fades.

“You see the cycle again and again, yet you don’t observe a substantial political or social change.”

That change must be radical and sweeping, which scares people and threatens powerful structures and entrenched interests. Akgüngör said there is only a short window following a catastrophe in which society demands changes.

“But that window closes very fast.”

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1999 Turkish earthquake survivor helping in Denver