Anatolia's Mad Melody of Terror

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the great Turkish earthquake and we were there.
Shake, rattle and roll (out of bed).

August 16th was like most other summer days in Istanbul – hot but not quite unbearably so because of the breezes blowing down from the Black Sea.

The opening of school was still several weeks away so work was mainly spent on getting the new teachers through orientation. We enjoyed a big group dinner that evening at a favorite restaurant overlooking the Bosphorus, the watery straight that separates Europe from Asia. Dining in the Turkish style – 3 or 4 hours, 5 or 6 courses, it was all very lovely.

Driving home well after midnight, a sliver of a crescent moon was hanging over the spires of the Blue Mosque across the water. It was a perfect scene, part of the endless parade of magical images that old Constantinople throws up.

Just after 3 in the morning, now August 17th, our building began to sway menacingly. This movement creates sensations you don’t want to experience in the middle of a good sleep: disorientation, panic and fear. Outside there was an eerie groaning as the ground began to break up for 150 kilometers over the fault line. By the time it was all over some 45 seconds later, 19,000 people were dead and 350,000 were homeless. Miraculously, there was little damage in Istanbul itself (just waiting for the next Big One, thank you) but massive destruction to the east closer to the epicenter.

One of my teachers, Alan Drew, later used the earthquake as the basis of the plot in his first novel Gardens of Water. More humbly, I wrote this in a journal six months after the infamous Anatolian earthquake:

It was the cacophony of sounds that I will always remember. Upstairs a window blew out. Pictures dropped from their hooks. Our little collectable knick-knacks fell one by one from the shadow box to the floor. Water and wineglasses jiggled and closet doors creaked open. Outside, the neighborhood dogs howled in panic and car alarms blared. It was bedlam. It was as though some crazed subterranean orchestra was playing a mad melody of terror.