![]() ![]() The sense of loss has been amplified in a very online country by the sharing of scenes and news it was as if we all lived each other’s emotions over and over again. No event has ever filled me with such grief. A disaster management plan existed, but in the final reckoning, the municipalities that had been envisaged as the rescuers themselves needed to be rescued. The destruction spread across some 500 square miles, an area larger than Portugal. ![]() Across the border in Syria, another 5,000 died in an area already devastated by war and U.S. Some 50,000 people were killed in Türkiye and millions more remain homeless, living in tents or containers. In the history books, the centenary so celebrated by the AKP government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - a hundred years since the Turkish victory in its independence war against colonial powers - will now also be remembered for this disaster. ![]() To the south of that mountain spine, the cities of Hatay and Antakya, two hubs of astounding cultural and historical richness, were devastated. Adana, Osmaniye, Nurdağı, Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Diyarbakır: The route I rode reads like a checklist of the cities on the path of the tremors. This ridge promised a single but big day of riding going west-east.įive months after I crossed, in the early morning hours, the plates of the East Anatolian Fault slipped and two enormous earthquakes of 7.8 and 7.7 magnitudes reverberated outward. But in between, looking as bracing as it had in the contours of my map, was a narrow spine of high mountains that ran perfectly north-south. Behind me were the flat, well-farmed fields of the Adana Plain, and ahead the flat, well-farmed fields of the Jabbul Plain stretching towards the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo. The next morning, the sun shone bright, and my view from the same window was a beautiful one. For many projects, the builder sells units from the bottom up and uses the revenue to pay for the completion of work through the remaining floors, and thus the building grows above its first inhabitants. ![]() Skyscrapers rise across Türkiye nowadays, and construction is a prominent backbone of the economy, but it is a common sight to see buildings in such semi-finished states. Unwalled floors were strewn with piping, cans of paint and debris - the project was either incomplete or abandoned altogether. I stuck my head out the window to look for the origin of the noise, and I could see the concrete shell of a building perhaps seven stories high. A racket clamored over in the next room, or perhaps the next building. In the small city of Osmaniye, I checked into a hotel. I departed from the house where Atatürk was born, in what is now the Greek city of Thessaloniki, and after about a month and 2,000 miles, I left the Mediterranean coast and moved northwards. Last autumn, uncomfortably close to the hard Anatolian winter, I set out to cycle across Türkiye with the goal of writing a roadside account of the country going into its centenary year. He has circumnavigated the world by bicycle, writing books about roadside anthropology across Europe, Palestine, China and the United States. Julian Sayarer is a long-distance cyclist and travel writer. ![]()
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