Sometime between midnight and morning, I was woken by the first shock of the earthquake. My bed, three meters from my desk on the cool ground floor of our stone-built house on a small rocky island in the Sea of Marmara (we know it as Sedefadas -- the mother-of-pearl island) started to rock violently back and forth, just like a little boat on a stormy sea. From the depths of the earth, from a point that appeared to be directly under my bed, rose a terrible rumbling noise.
Instinctively, barely knowing what I was doing, I got up, stumbled out into the garden without even putting on my glasses and ran from the house.
Outside, the night was filled with action and excitement, as though everything was happening at once. Part of my mind registered the shaking, which continued at full strength, and took in the rumbling from below the earth. Another part wondered why people were shooting at this time of night (probably a part of my brain contains a special memory of the political murders, bombings and shots tearing the night apart in the 1960s, kept behind a locked door that only opens in times of crisis). Later, I spent a long time wondering where these rifle shots came from, but I could find no explanation.
The first shock lasted 45 seconds. It may have taken 40,000 lives. Even before it had ended, I had run from the garden, up the side stairs to where my wife and daughter were on the first floor. They were both awake, waiting terrified in the dark. The electricity had long since gone off. We walked down to the garden together. The terrible rumbling had stopped and everything waited in a state of shock. The garden, the trees, the tiny island with its steep cliffs -- everything was as quiet as it always was. Only my violently beating heart told me that something terrible was happening. We whispered to one another, perhaps so as not to anger the earthquake again. A few weaker aftershocks came, and we started to calm down. Later, as my seven-year-old daughter had fallen asleep in my arms, I lay with her in the hammock in the garden and listened to ambulance sirens coming from the Kartal district in the Istanbul suburbs.
sharing experiences
Over the next few days I listened to a lot of people and found out what they had done during the first 45 deadly seconds. Around 20 million people felt the shock of the quake and heard the roars from the depths of the earth. Throughout the first week, they only described these few seconds and did not mention the dead. Everyone wanted to share the experience of their 45 seconds with other people. The most frequent comment was: "If you weren't there, you couldn't begin to understand."
A pharmacist who emerged safely from one of the collapsed blocks of flats described how he floated upwards in the five-story block for a moment and how the building suddenly collapsed on top of him.
Some people woke up because they were being jerked to the left and right, shaken back and forth with the building. They then believed they were going to die because their home was tilting and toppling over. When their fall was broken by the neighboring building, they all immediately ran to another person and embraced them. Which explains why so many of the corpses brought out of the rubble were lying next to one another.
With the first shock, pots, televisions, cupboards, bookshelves, ornaments and everything hanging on the walls fell to the ground. So mothers, sons, uncles and grandfathers were unable to find their way about their apartments. They were hit by the power of these falling objects and came up against unknown walls in the dark. In all the clouds of dust and darkness, people lost their sense of direction even in their own homes. Even so, some people managed to run downstairs and into the open air during that 45 seconds, before the building collapsed.
RSS