Architect Buse Ceren Gul is on a mission: Restore a 166-year-old Greek Orthodox church that was long a beacon of her hometown’s multicultural past. She believes restoring the church left mostly in ruins by the earthquakes in southern Turkey three years ago would help locals reconnect to their city.
The magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, and another hours later were among Turkey’s worst disasters. In Antakya, the quakes destroyed much of the historical town center.
After years of planning, campaigning and fundraising, Gul’s team recently uncovered St. Paul’s Church from the rubble that reached up to 5m.
Photo: AP
“The old city is central to the earliest memories of anyone who grew up here,” the 34-year-old Gul said. “’Have we vanished?’ I asked myself when I first saw the site in the aftermath of the quakes.”
The quakes destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in Turkey, leaving more than 53,000 people dead.
An estimated 10,000 Christians lived in Hatay Province before the earthquake, a tiny part of the overall population, but one of the largest Christian concentrations in Turkey outside Istanbul.
Photo: AP
Antakya was one of the hardest-hit cities, with the destruction threatening to erase one of its oldest streets, Saray Avenue, a hub for Christians, Muslims and Jews of different sects. The street is home to the Greek Orthodox St. Paul’s Church, which belongs to an Arabic-speaking community.
The neighborhood, like others in Antakya, has become “unrecognizable to its residents,” Gul said.
“But raising the old city on its feet might prove that Antakya’s roots can be preserved once again,” she added.
Gul was studying and working on the St. Paul’s Church’s renovation since before the earthquakes. Of the 293 cultural heritage sites damaged in the province, the church is among the few that already had approved architectural drawings, which Gul was drafting.
“When I was working on those plans, one of my mentors told me to draw in a way that the church can get rebuilt if it gets demolished,” Gul said. “I never thought this grand structure could actually be obliterated, but I drafted a point-by-point plan.”
After the quake, Gul secured the support of the World Monuments Fund, and with the fund’s technical and financial contributions, Gul’s team cleared tons of rubble and set aside the stones they recovered intact. The team continues project planning and technical assessments for the reconstruction stage, but the work on site has stalled until more funding arrives.
The main challenge for the Antioch Orthodox Christians is the return of people who once filled the St. Paul’s Church’s courtyard and the Saray Avenue district. With most houses in the historical city center still in ruins, the majority of the city’s Greek Orthodox community are displaced from their ancestral homes.
Fadi Hurigil, president of the Greek Orthodox Church Foundation of Antakya, which oversees the reconstruction project, said 370 to 400 families lived in central Antakya before the quakes, of whom only about 90 have returned.
Residents and community leaders who lived in the city for generations fear that the extended displacement would upend the long-established intercultural harmony that characterized Antakya.
“We grew up in Saray Avenue, now there is no Saray Avenue,” said Dimitri Dogum, a St. Paul’s Church official whose family lived in Antakya for the past 400 years. “So many people have left the city already and it could take another five years until Antakya recovers.”
Dogum, who is a Christian, said he fears his son and the children of his Sunni Muslim friends would not form the sort of friendships and interfaith dialogue he enjoyed when he spent long days of his boyhood playing on the street together.
“People are gone now,” said Dogum. “My fear is that we will lose the culture of living together.”
VAGUE: The criteria of the amnesty remain unclear, but it would cover political violence from 1999 to today, and those convicted of murder or drug trafficking would not qualify Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez on Friday announced an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of hundreds of prisoners, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists detained for political reasons. The measure had long been sought by the US-backed opposition. It is the latest concession Rodriguez has made since taking the reins of the country on Jan. 3 after the brazen seizure of then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Rodriguez told a gathering of justices, magistrates, ministers, military brass and other government leaders that the ruling party-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly would take up the bill with urgency. Rodriguez also announced the shutdown
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
A Virginia man having an affair with the family’s Brazilian au pair on Monday was found guilty of murdering his wife and another man that prosecutors say was lured to the house as a fall guy. Brendan Banfield, a former Internal Revenue Service law enforcement officer, told police he came across Joseph Ryan attacking his wife, Christine Banfield, with a knife on the morning of Feb. 24, 2023. He shot Ryan and then Juliana Magalhaes, the au pair, shot him, too, but officials argued in court that the story was too good to be true, telling jurors that Brendan Banfield set
RSS