Taking a look at the world’s most severe earthquakes throughout history, one will discover that a striking number have afflicted northwest Syria and southeast Turkey, especially the area between Aleppo and the Mediterranean coast.
Southeast Turkey and northwest Syria sit at the confluence of three tectonic plates — the Arabian, Anatolian and African plates — which push against each other, increasing the pressure and friction that causes the earthquakes.
Today this same area has the great misfortune to be where, in the province of Idlib, some 3 million Syrians are currently kettled, some because of their opposition to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad based in Damascus, and others through the mere accident of geography.
Many have been displaced multiple times within Syria over the course of the uprising-turned-war that began in March 2011. Large numbers arrived, too, from Aleppo after it was bombed into submission by Russian and Syrian aerial strikes in December 2016.
Historic Syria, as opposed to the modern truncated rump state of al-Assad’s Syria, extended from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Sinai Desert in the south and, therefore, included ancient Antioch, today’s Antakya in modern Turkey’s Hatay Province — a city of great importance in the early history of Christianity.
The first recorded earthquake struck Antioch in 115 AD, and the city was said to have been completely flattened, killing 260,000 people, and almost killing Emperor Trajan, who was over-wintering following a military campaign. Seismologists have estimated its magnitude to have been 7.5.
Roman historian Cassius Dio gave a vivid account of the moment it struck: “First there came a great bellowing roar, and this was followed by tremendous quaking. The whole earth was upheaved, and buildings leaped into the air,” he said.
“Some were carried aloft only to collapse and be broken in pieces, while others were tossed this way and that as if by the surge of the sea, and overturned, and the wreckage spread out over a great extent even of the open country.”