Lying on three fault lines and infamous for its substandard construction before 1998, Turkey is undoubtedly the country in the Balkans that has suffered the highest number of major earthquakes and the highest number of casualties. The country is still tallying the death toll from Monday’s series of devastating tremors, and hope for those buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings is fading. Experts attribute the high death toll to poor construction until the 1990s, before regulations were changed and the amount of concrete and iron put into buildings was greatly increased. After the new earthquake, experts draw attention to the fact that the buildings that collapsed were mostly those built before the new millennium, when the new construction regulation had not yet been introduced. This fact once again confirmed the popular wisdom, which has become a proverb in Turkey, that “it is not earthquakes, but buildings that kill”.
TURKEY
KAHRAMANMARAS – 2023
Early dawn on Monday, February 6, at 4:17 a.m. local time, the country was shaken by a strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 and epicenter in the city of Pazardzhak, Kahramanmarash district. About nine hours later, at 1:24 p.m., another strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.6 shook the same region. The two earthquakes affected a total of ten counties in southern Turkey, killing thousands of people, injuring tens of thousands and causing heavy material damage. According to the latest data, 8,574 people died in Turkey, and 49,133 people were injured in the disaster. Thousands of buildings were completely destroyed. Neighboring Syria was also heavily damaged by the earthquakes, where the tremors killed at least 2,270 people, according to current data. There are fears that the toll will continue to rise. The chance of finding survivors under the rubble decreases as time progresses, and the discovery of living people under collapsed buildings has already become news.
AEGEAN SEA – 2020
On October 30, 2020, 117 people died in Turkey and two in Greece in an earthquake in the Aegean Sea. The 6.9-magnitude quake occurred at 2:51 p.m. near the island of Samos and severely affected the nearby Turkish district of Izmir. Over a thousand people were injured in Turkey and 19 in Greece.
ELIAZH – 2020
More than 40 people died and more than 1,030 were injured in a deadly earthquake on January 24, 2020, with a magnitude of 6.8 and epicenter in Elyağı County, eastern Turkey. The earthquake destroyed 76 buildings and damaged more than 1,000 others, forcing survivors to seek shelter in tents, mosques, schools, gymnasiums and student dormitories. The tremor also severely affected the nearby Malatya district, and was also felt in neighboring countries, including Georgia and Syria.
VAN – 2010
On October 23 and November 9, 2010, Van County, Eastern Turkey, was rocked by two strong earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 5.7. The earthquake in October killed 604 people and destroyed at least 2,000 buildings in the cities of Ercis and Van. A further 36 people died when two hotels in the city center of Van collapsed in the November 9 earthquake, including a Japanese aid worker and two Turkish journalists who had arrived in the area to cover the first quake. The balance of the two earthquakes is 644 dead, thousands injured and about 2,000 completely destroyed buildings.
BINGYOL – 2003
177 people died in the May 1, 2003, magnitude 6.4 Bingyol earthquake. More than half of the victims were children from a collapsed boarding school. Hundreds of residents of this eastern Turkish district were injured and thousands left homeless.
KOJAELI – 1999
On August 17, 1999, an earthquake with its epicenter in the village of Golcuk, Kocaeli County, northwestern Turkey, a powerful 7.4-magnitude earthquake killed 17,118 people, according to official statistics. The İzmit earthquake, as this tremor is known, struck at 3:02 a.m. in the entire area around the Sea of Marmara, causing tens of thousands of casualties and causing heavy material damage. According to unofficial data, the dead as a result of the earthquake were more than 65 thousand, more than 100 thousand were injured, and about 600 thousand were left homeless.
ERZINJAN – 1939.
A magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Erzincan County on December 27, 1939 went down in history as the most devastating earthquake in the country’s recent history, killing 32,968 people according to official figures. Over a hundred thousand were injured in this earthquake, which lasted about 50 seconds, and about 120 thousand buildings were destroyed to the ground.
In the last century, several more large earthquakes were recorded, each of which claimed thousands of lives, mostly in the eastern part of Turkey.
GREECE
On June 26, 1926, an earthquake between 7.7 and 8 on the Richter scale near the island of Rhodes destroyed thousands of houses not only on Rhodes, but also on Crete, Halki, Kos, Karpathos and other Greek islands. Miraculously, only 12 people died in Rhodes, mainly because the main quake was preceded by micro-earthquakes that alerted residents to leave their homes.
However, as many as 120 died in the seventh-magnitude earthquake that occurred on September 26, 1932, in the area of Ierissos on the Halkidiki peninsula.
Even more – 178, were the victims of the earthquake with a magnitude of 6.6, which affected the island of Kos on April 23, 1933.
The three consecutive earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.4, 6.8 and 5.2 on the Richter scale, which took place between August 9 and 12, 1953 in the Ionian Sea, took the most victims. The worst affected are the islands of Zakynthos, Ithaca and Kefalonia. In total, the victims were 455, and the villages of Argostoli, Lixouri and Zakynthos were destroyed.
On July 9, 1956, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake shook the Aegean island of Amorgos. According to some data, this was the strongest earthquake in Greece in the 20th century. Minutes later, an earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale also hit the island of Santorini. The tremors cause a tsunami with a height of 30 m. The natural disaster causes the death of 53 people. Over 500 houses collapse in Santorini.
An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale struck the Aegio area on the Gulf of Corinth on June 15, 1995. 26 people died and serious property damage was caused.
The January 8, 2006 earthquake near the island of Kythira had a magnitude of 6.9. Many old buildings are collapsing. However, the earthquake had only one victim, a man who died of a heart attack.
The next two major earthquakes in Greece, on July 21, 2017 near O. Kos and on October 30, 2020 near Fr. Samos, both magnitude 6.7, rises in the sea between the Greek Dodecanese and the Turkish coast. In both of them, two people died in Greece, and in the first, many old buildings on Samos were damaged. Second earthquake claims 117 lives in Turkey.
REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA
In today’s Republic of North Macedonia, at that time the Socialist Republic of Macedonia as part of Yugoslavia, 60 years ago one of the most destructive earthquakes on the Balkan Peninsula occurred.
On July 26, 1963, at 5:17 a.m., Skopje was rocked by a catastrophic earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale, destroying the city almost to its foundations. The tremor lasted 20 seconds and was felt most strongly along the Vardar River valley, followed by numerous weaker aftershocks. The earthquake claimed the lives of 1,070 people and over 4,000 were injured. About 15,800 buildings were destroyed and another 28,000 were damaged. About 200,000 people remain homeless. Countries from all over the world, including Bulgaria, are helping to rebuild the destroyed city.
A symbol of the devastating disaster remains the half-destroyed building of the old station, which currently houses the Skopje Museum. The clock on its facade still reads exactly 5:17 a.m. when the fatal earthquake toppled the city.
ROMANIA
On March 4, 1977, at 9:22 p.m., Romania was rocked by a powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 7.4 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in the Vranca Mountains in the Eastern Carpathians at a depth of 94 km. The tremor lasted 55 seconds, and the shock wave was felt in almost the entire Balkan region. This is the strongest earthquake recorded in the country in the last 50 years (the previous major earthquake in Romania was on November 10, 1940 – it measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and is believed to have killed around 1,000 people , and about 4,000 were injured).
The quake killed 1,578 people nationally (1,424 in Bucharest) and injured 11,321 (7,598 in Bucharest). In the capital, 32 buildings of high and medium height were destroyed, and in the country a total of 32,900 buildings were severely damaged, including 760 enterprises. About 200,000 people are directly affected by the consequences.
In Bulgaria, the earthquake was felt throughout the country. Svishtov was the most affected, where an eight-story building and the dormitory of the chemical plant “Sviloza” collapsed, killing more than 120 people and injuring more than 140. During the rescue operation, 31 people were pulled out alive from under the debris. Serious material damage was caused to many buildings in the city.
The next major earthquake in Romania was recorded on August 30, 1986, with a magnitude of 7.1, and its epicenter was again in Vranca, 177 kilometers north of Bucharest. The quake at a depth of 131 kilometers killed at least 150 people and injured over 500. On May 30 and 31, 1990, a series of earthquakes were recorded again in Vranca, the two strongest of which were of magnitude 6.9 and 6.4. They took the lives of eight people in Romania (there were three more victims in the Republic of Moldova and one in Bulgaria), and 296 were injured. This is the last deadly earthquake in Romania.
Statistics show that in the Vranca seismic region, earthquakes with a magnitude of 6 or more occur approximately every 10 years, earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 – every 33 years, and those with a magnitude above 7.5 – every 80 years.
ALBANIA
On 26 November 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake killed 51 people and injured around 3,000 others in northwestern Albania. This is the deadliest earthquake in the last 99 years. The epicenter is in the area of the port city of Durres, about 36 kilometers northwest of the capital Tirana, and the depth of the outbreak is about 20 kilometers. 601 buildings and 2,431 houses were destroyed or severely damaged, and thousands of people were left homeless.
In the last century, the country has been rocked by other strong earthquakes, which preceded the one of 2019. On November 30, 1967, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter between Librazhd and Debar caused serious damage in both Albania and Macedonia. 12 dead, 174 injured and 6,336 homes destroyed were reported.
On April 15, 1979, an earthquake with a magnitude between 6.4 and 7 according to various sources shook Shkodra, with the number of dead in Shkodra and Leža being 40 people, 17,118 homes, public and cultural buildings were destroyed. According to some data, the epicenter is between Shkodra and the Montenegrin city of Bar, with the victims being significantly more on the Montenegrin side.
BLACK FOREST
The April 15, 1979 earthquake shook the entire Adriatic coast of Montenegro, then one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia, and killed 101 people there, along with victims in neighboring Albania. In the cities of Ulcinj, Bar, Petrovac, Budva, Tivat, Kotor, hotels, health facilities, social and children’s homes, as well as many homes were destroyed. About 100,000 people remain homeless.
CROATIA
The earthquake in the Croatian city of Petrinja on December 29, 2020 had a magnitude of 6.4 on the Richter scale and caused significant damage in the city located in the central part of Croatia. As a result of the earthquake, eight people died and 36 were injured. At least 9,000 houses were destroyed and 1,800 were left uninhabitable after the quake. It is believed to be the strongest earthquake in Croatia in 140 years.
CYPRUS
Two devastating earthquakes measuring 6.1 and 6 on the Richter scale hit the Paphos district on September 10, 1953. 40 people died, 100 were injured and 4,000 were left homeless. 5 villages with 1,600 houses were destroyed, and another 105 settlements were damaged. A small tsunami was also observed off the coast of Cyprus.
On October 9, 1996, the southwestern part of Cyprus was rocked by the strongest earthquake in the country’s recent history, with a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale. The earthquake caused panic in Paphos and Limassol, Nicosia, Larnaca and Paralimni. Two people died, all from secondary causes, and 20 were slightly injured. There is limited damage in Paphos and Limassol.
On January 11, 2022, a strong 6.6 magnitude earthquake once again had its epicenter in the Paphos area. In Cyprus, damage was limited, but possibly as a result of the quake.A few hours later in Damietta, Egypt, a four-story building collapsed, killing three people and injuring one.
(BTA – Mina Dimitrova, Vanya Nakova, Magdalena Dimitrova, Petar Kudrev)
