|
Two particularly devastating earthquakes around A.D. 500 demolished Troy once and for all. In fact, an unparalleled wave of big earthquakes from the mid-fourth to the mid-sixth centuries hit all the major cities of southwestern Turkey: Pergamum, Aphrodisias, Ephesus, Smyrna. This puzzling sequence, called the early Byzantine tectonic paroxysm, may reflect a huge shifting of plates from Palestine to Crete. "It was not a good time to be alive," says Brian Rose, an archaeologist at the University of Cincinnati. "The earthquakes kept coming."
The force that gives rise to most of the earthquakes that plague the Aegean region of Turkey is called extension. As the subducting African plate stretches and thins the crust, great cracks known as grabens open up. The grabens become valleys that fill with fertile sediments.
Extension in the Aegean has enriched the soil of southwestern Turkey. But the same process, occurring too rapidly and accompanied by centuries of deforestation, has encourages the buildup of too much silt in many places, turning waterways into swamps and until recently encouraging the spread of malaria.
Almost 17,000 feet (5,182 meters) high, Ararat, flanked by its smaller sister, Little Ararat, dominates vistas along the Turkish-Iranian border. No wonder the ancients believed that this ice-crowned massif would be the first land to emerge from a great flood. But today the legends that have surrounded the mountain are forgotten by residents of Doðubayazit, the nearest town—charmless, commercial, and ravaged by years of Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
"People in the town don't know anything," says a local hotelier, Feyyaz Salman. "But my 110-year-old grandmother, who lives in a nearby village, told me the two mountains were sisters who hated each other. Little Ararat cursed her big sister, saying 'May you grow so tall you will always have snow on your head.' In turn, Big Ararat cursed her little sister; 'May you always be so close I can control you. And may you always have snakes in your hair.'"
Neither volcano has erupted in recent memory, but residents of eastern Turkey have much to fear from earthquakes. The compressions resulting from Arabia's northward thrust is pushing Turkey westward in jolts, like fingers squeezing the pit from a cherry.
No city in Turkey has suffered more pain from earthquakes over the centuries than the ancient metropolis of Antioch. In A.D. 115 the Emperor Trajan blamed an earthquake that destroyed the city on the presence of Christians and had the bishop, Ignatius, thrown to the lions. Walls fell again in A.D. 458. In 526 an earthquake killed 300,000 people, according to the historian Procopius. His figures are exaggerated, but other crushing earthquakes occurred the same year. Plague hit in 542, Persian armies in 573. Another earthquake in 588 closed a devastating century.
National Geographic
|
