In the early two-thousands, Turkey’s Ministry of Transportation began construction on an airport in Hatay Province, in southern Turkey. The new Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had run on a platform of religious freedom, social services for the poor, and housing and development; he had promised to put an airport in every region. The plans had caught the attention of a local architect named Ercüment Kimyon. Kimyon’s family had grown wheat on one of the many small farms near the drained bed of Lake Amik, the proposed site of the airport. When Kimyon was a child, his parents moved to İskenderun, the second-largest city in Hatay. In the mid-eighties, he opened an architecture firm, designing small apartment buildings in middle-class neighborhoods. Kimyon became a board member of the local Chamber of Architects, one of the many associations in Turkey—there are chambers of engineers, of geologists, of urban planners—that serve as citizen advocates: they monitor public-infrastructure projects, campaign for the protection of the environment and of cultural-heritage sites, and insure that buildings follow earthquake-safety codes.
In time, this advocacy work consumed Kimyon. He studied zoning laws, looking for signs of rant, money made from illegal construction schemes and kicked back to politicians. He took the municipality to court for everything—for employing thuggish private-security companies, for raising the price of water, for overcharging for photocopies. He joined the C.H.P., the party of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and he talked to the press incessantly. The main issue was “the integrity of the city,” he said. He knew that many buildings were dangerously tall, or built on soft soil, making them vulnerable to collapse. “My father used to tell us about the swampy ground in İskenderun,” he told me. Then “the swamp areas were being opened for housing construction.”
Many people in the city thought that Kimyon was a nuisance. The mayor, Mete Aslan, made it clear that no one should work with him. His architecture business struggled and then, around 2000, stopped entirely. “After that point, I said that as an individual living in this city, as a citizen, I have constitutional rights,” Kimyon said. He continued to file suits against projects that he thought were unwise, confirming his reputation as a gadfly.
In the case of the Hatay airport, Kimyon said, he found himself “explaining the disadvantages of building on what was a deteriorating former lake bed.” The ground was prone to flooding, and nearby mountains made it hard for planes to land. In addition, the area was a corridor for migrating birds. The Chamber of Geological Engineers told officials that an active fault ran nearby. “It was on an earthquake line,” Kimyon said. “We knew the hot springs there came from the active fault.” But the project was a priority for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (known in English as the A.K. Party), and it was impossible to stop. “When we saw the implementations after the A.K. Party came, we lost hope,” Hasan Turunç, a former mayor of Tavla, a village near the airport, said. “They acted of their own accord, based entirely on self-interest, with no scientific input.” In 2007, Erdoğan attended the grand opening of the airport. For years afterward, the runway and the terminals would flood periodically.
Between 1999 and 2022, Turkey, which sits at a crossroads of several tectonic plates, saw five significant earthquakes, including two in Elazığ, which straddles the same fault as Hatay. On December 18, 2022, during the World Cup final, between Argentina and France, residents of Hatay felt a tremor. Kimyon thought that it was “a sign, a harbinger of a bigger earthquake,” he said. On January 22nd, Kimyon posted on Facebook, “Shouldn’t experts and responsible public officials focus on the earthquakes being felt in Hatay?”
Fifteen days later, at 4:17 A.M., Kimyon, a stocky sixty-five-year-old man with a full head of curly black hair and a mustache, was asleep at his summer house, a half hour from İskenderun. He awoke because he thought the wind was blowing through his curtains. Then he heard the jangling of liquor bottles on the mantel, and the room began to shake, as if it were being violently churned in a bowl. Kimyon ran out to his garden.
The earthquake, 7.8 magnitude, affected more than fifteen million people in Turkey and Syria. In Turkey, the rupture stretched for hundreds of miles, from the seaside village of Samandağ, on the southernmost tip of Hatay, through the cities of Kahramanmaraş, Gaziantep, Malatya, Adana, Elazığ, and Adıyaman, in Turkey’s Anatolian heartland, to Urfa and Diyarbakır, in the Kurdish southeast. Kimyon’s daughters, Derya, in Istanbul, and Deniz, in Paris, had been trying to reach him. Finally, Deniz got through and heard only a few words: “Don’t be afraid, my daughter, I’m O.K.”
Six of Kimyon’s relatives died that day. Some fifty thousand people have been pronounced dead in Turkey, but few believe that number is accurate. More than a hundred and sixty thousand buildings, containing some five hundred and twenty thousand households, collapsed; people think that the death toll could be as high as two hundred thousand.
Some buildings toppled like trees, right off their foundations. Others pancaked straight down. Hospitals, police stations, hotels, churches, and mosques collapsed, roads broke, tunnels cracked. The İskenderun port was on fire for four days. Survivors ran out into the pitch dark, into torrential rains, in the south, and snowfall, in the north. The phone lines were down, their world was gone. There was nothing to do but start digging.
Nine hours later, at 1:24 P.M., a second earthquake struck, almost as strong as the first. Much of what hadn’t fallen now fell; many who hadn’t died now died. People stood in the rain before the broken buildings where their family members were trapped, crying out from within. In the forty-eight hours after the earthquakes, hardly any search-and-rescue teams came to Hatay. The Turkish disaster- and emergency-management organization AFAD, the centuries-old aid organization the Red Crescent, and many foreign rescue teams—which volunteer in major emergencies—largely failed to reach people. Turunç, the former village mayor, told me, “For three days, four days, five days, people could not find a pickaxe, not even a shovel, and they could not be reached.” Even the Turkish military was absent. Civilians and local officials took to Twitter:
One reason no help came was that the region was not accessible by plane: the Hatay airport’s lone runway had split in two.
The day after the earthquakes, Erdoğan declared a state of emergency in southern Turkey. In a televised broadcast, he was clearly angry, but he directed his anger not at the ineffectual response but at the people who had expressed disappointment in the response. “Our prosecutors will identify those who attempt to cause social chaos through inhumane methods and take necessary actions,” Erdoğan said. “We will follow those who intend to set our people against one another with fake news and distortions. . . . When the day comes, we will open the notebook we keep.” The next day, the government shut down Twitter for twelve hours.
The force of the two earthquakes—plus a third, which struck Hatay two weeks later—would have incapacitated any country, and most governments would have had trouble responding to a calamity of such scale. But the incompetence and, at times, the inhumanity of Erdoğan’s regime came as a surprise even to hardened critics. “Erdoğan is right when he says a lot of the buildings that collapsed were built before him,” Tuna Kuyucu, a sociologist at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul, who studies urban development, said. “But then the right question to ask Erdoğan is: What were you doing for the past twenty years, when the old buildings were very likely to collapse?”
Erdoğan, during his time in office, has instituted a relentless program of building—apartment towers, malls, bridges, and airports—aimed at improving the lives of a large swath of voters. He brags about having designed a Turkish state that runs on technological prowess and expertise. In fact, he created a party machinery, a wealthy business class, and a dependent poor whose loyalty made his repression of civil society relatively easy. Then he centralized power around his person, rendering Turkey a country that no longer works. The earthquakes highlighted a two-pronged failure—the failure to prepare and the failure to respond—that was rooted in the A.K. Party’s decades-long reign. Erdoğan is up for reëlection for President on May 14th, in the year of the hundredth anniversary of the Turkish Republic. It is a chance to cement his legacy as the replacement of the secularist hero Atatürk. But many Turks feel that another Erdoğan term will mean not only dictatorship but death.
Erdoğan grew up in a religious family, in a poor neighborhood in Istanbul, the son of a ferry captain who had migrated from the Black Sea region. As a teen-ager, he sold lemonade and simit, a Turkish bagel, in the streets. He rose through local politics as a member of the Islamist Welfare Party, and, in 1994, at the age of forty, he was elected mayor of Istanbul. At the time, the city was derelict, with unreliable electricity and running water, and mounds of trash everywhere. Erdoğan gained a reputation for cleaning up the city and improving its services. He formed ties with religious businesspeople, distributing public money through their networks. One of Erdoğan’s first actions as mayor was to fire unionized municipal workers and hire private companies, which employed members of the poor, to provide city services. “Let’s say he contracted a private company for the city cleaning crew,” Berk Esen, a professor of political science at Sabancı University, on the outskirts of Istanbul, said. “That company is owned by a conservative person affiliated with the Party, so it’s killing two birds with one stone.” Erdoğan made a new class of businessmen wealthy and provided jobs to the poor. In turn, both groups loved him—a tall, charismatic man who gave rousing speeches and walked like a kabadayı, a street fighter.
In 1998, the secularist judiciary, wary of Erdoğan’s popularity, managed to prosecute him for giving a speech in which he recited a poem that, it claimed, had inflammatory religious undertones. He spent four months in jail and emerged a hero with a new political strategy: to form a party that was not explicitly Islamist but, rather, pro-accession to the European Union, pro-business, pro-democracy, pro-human rights. In 2002, the A.K. Party won almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament.
Two major crises played a role in the Party’s sudden success. One was an earthquake, in 1999, that killed seventeen thousand people, causing disillusionment with the existing political parties. Afterward, the government passed a special tax, to repair the damage and to renovate buildings that were still vulnerable to earthquakes. The tax was supposed to be temporary, but the A.K. Party made it permanent, accumulating billions of dollars. Erdoğan also used the money to fund the construction of highways, bridges, and other infrastructure projects which, the Party argued, would make Turkey into a modern country.
The second crisis was financial, the result of decades of corruption and dysfunction. In return for a nineteen-billion-dollar bailout, Turkey agreed to follow a program of privatization and anti-corruption laws outlined by the I.M.F. Erdoğan embraced the privatization of state companies but eschewed the anti-corruption initiatives. His party made more than a hundred amendments to public-procurement laws, allowing it to award construction contracts to allies, especially to a group of companies that became known as the Gang of Five. (In reality, it’s more like a gang of twenty.) Between 1986 and 2002, the government made eight billion dollars from privatization; between 2004 and 2014, it made fifty-six billion dollars. “I can confidently say that the seeds of this corrupt regime were there from early on,” Kuyucu, the professor of sociology, told me. Like many liberals, Kuyucu had had some sympathy for the A.K. Party’s initial platform of democratic reforms and religious freedom. Working on his Ph.D. thesis, on urban renewal, had changed his perspective, he said—it helped him see “the amount of corruption in privatization deals, in construction, and in urban renewal.” Projects launched under the auspices of earthquake safety and urban renewal often ended with the replacement of lower-class housing by luxury condos.
In Turkey, a substantial amount of vacant land is owned by government ministries. When a party comes to power, it has access to this free land. “So they take over public land—let’s say a green space, a park—and they construct a shopping mall, and they make enormous amounts of money,” Esen told me. “That money is passed around to civil servants, local politicians, state employees, and members of the Party. Basically, you make money out of nothing. It’s like finding oil.” In the early two-thousands, for instance, the Turkish Highway Authority sold a plot of land to a developer, who built the Zorlu Center—an enormous complex that included a shopping mall, an office park, apartments, and a Raffles hotel. When the complex was completed, in 2013, it had much more square footage than had been authorized. Later that year, leaked details of a corruption probe alleged that the developer had been able to bypass zoning requirements in exchange for bribes.
Homeownership was part of Erdoğan’s vision for a modern, consumer-driven middle class. To accelerate the construction of more housing, the A.K. Party continued to have developers use private companies to inspect their projects. Istanbul’s greatest natural and historical assets—its silhouette, its lush forests, its Bosporus, its ancient streets—became Erdoğan’s personal surplus. The skyline filled with huge cranes and towers, and the streets rattled from jackhammers at all hours. The Istanbul municipality had a master plan, created under the leadership of Hüseyin Kaptan, an urban-planning professor. It included the establishment of ecozones to protect northern forests and water reserves. But in 2011, during his reëlection campaign, Erdoğan started talking about what he called his “crazy project,” Kanal Istanbul—essentially, a second waterway that would be built toward the west of the city, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, cutting European Istanbul in two. He also announced plans for a third airport, in northern Istanbul, which meant constructing runways in an area of high winds and migrating birds. All this expansion required more highways, more metros, more malls, more apartment buildings, more roads, and another bridge over the Bosporus. The contracts for much of this development went to the Gang of Five. Kaptan resigned in protest.
Turkey’s construction boom was, in many ways, effective. In the first decade of Erdoğan’s rule, the country’s G.D.P. per capita tripled. The Economist touted the “Turkish model,” writing that the A.K. Party had “boosted the country’s standing and shown that the coming to power of pious people need not mean a dramatic rupture in ties with the West.” The Brookings Institution called Turkey “arguably the most dynamic experiment with political Islam among the fifty-seven nations of the Muslim world.”
In 2012, Erdoğan announced another mega project: a shopping mall in the style of old Ottoman military barracks, in Gezi Park, a patch of green space in Taksim Square, the crowded center of Istanbul and the heart of its boozy night life. On May 28, 2013, a group of young environmental activists sat in the park to protest the project. After police tried to clear the area, the protest grew into an uprising of hundreds of thousands of people in more than seventy cities. Erdoğan was furious, and he responded with a police crackdown that resulted in eleven deaths and thousands of injuries and arrests. The protests were a genuine threat to him: they involved not only the youth but also middle-class families who had grown sick of overdevelopment and were outraged by the government’s use of violence against peaceful protesters.
Then, that December, a series of audio recordings were released on social media by former allies of Erdoğan’s, followers of the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who occupied key positions in the judicial system, state ministries, the national media, the education system, and the national police. (Gülen denies involvement in the release of the audio.) Erdoğan and the Gülenists had begun falling out over a range of political issues. The recordings—of Erdoğan, one of his sons, and his ministers—revealed to the public that Erdoğan was granting private construction permits on public land in exchange for bribes. On one tape, Erdoğan, after learning of an unsatisfactory bribe, tells his son Bilal, “Don’t take it. Whatever he has promised us, he should deliver it. . . . What do they think this business is? But don’t worry, they will fall into our lap.” (Erdoğan has said that the audio is fake.)
“The spell was broken with the Gezi protests,” Osman Can, a former judge on the Constitutional Court and a member of the A.K. Party’s central executive committee between 2012 and 2015, recalled. “With the corruption revelations, an era of anxiety began. There had been an ambience of ‘Everything will be fine, everything is under control.’ Now they began to fear. The fear was existential.” Thousands of Gülenists were fired from their posts, beginning a hollowing out of state institutions. Mücella Yapıcı, a member of the Chamber of Architects in Istanbul, who had participated in the Gezi protests, received an eighteen-year prison sentence for aiding an attempt to overthrow the government. Tayfun Kahraman, the executive-board chairman of the Chamber of Urban Planners and the head of the Department of Earthquake Risk Management and Urban Renewal in Istanbul, who had also spoken out during Gezi, received a similar sentence. In 2013, a pro-Erdoğan newspaper published the headline “The Authority of Architects and Engineers Is Over.”
When I first visited İskenderun, three weeks after the earthquakes, the city still had no running water. Mountains of rubble had replaced streets, and the buildings that still stood were badly damaged. İskenderun was completely dark at night. Everywhere, people were leaving, heaping pickup trucks with stoves, mattresses, mops, and buckets—even front doors torn off their hinges. People slept in tents in parks and on roadsides.
Near the site of a collapsed primary school and church, I met three engineers, one American and two Turkish. They told me that pinpointing the specific reason each structure had collapsed would require a thorough investigation. An expert would have to assess the quality of concrete and rebar; whether the support columns on the bottom floors of the building had been removed to make more commercial space, as is common in Turkey; and if the foundation had been laid deeply enough.
Yet authorities had begun detaining hundreds of people involved in construction all over the region. On a plane, I met a judge who told me he thought that every one of them was guilty.
But Turunç, the former village mayor, didn’t think the workers alone were to blame. “The municipal governments that were allied with the government did not receive any supervision,” he said. “The bids were made entirely on the basis of personal connections.” He went on, “The zoning plan determines the floor area, and the town council determines the zoning plan. The real crime takes place before the contractor goes to work. Why didn’t this study take place? Why didn’t the ministry warn people, why didn’t the municipalities ask experts? Something was wrong from the beginning. The state officials are responsible for this. And, instead of resigning or taking action, they are arresting a lot of men.”
Kimyon spent the weeks after the earthquakes tending to his beloved, broken city. İbrahim Akın, a friend and a political ally, told me, “When you go into the street with him, and people say, ‘Ercüment, brother, we need this,’ he responds immediately.” Kimyon and Akın surveyed the wreckage. “This is the result of the construction sector’s desire to build on every empty space it finds downtown,” Kimyon said. “But we were somewhat luckier than Antakya”—an hour away—which was now “a dead city.” Kimyon’s aunt, who is ninety-four, lived in an apartment above a hotel in İskenderun which had collapsed. She was presumed dead after the earthquakes, but three days later, when rescue teams sent in dogs, she was pulled out alive. Kimyon’s brother, who was in a wheelchair, lived in a building complex, called İnci Kent, that Kimyon had worked on almost thirty years before. İnci Kent was damaged in the earthquakes, and Kimyon arranged for his brother’s care in a nursing home. And Kimyon, as always, talked to the local press, went on TV, and gave interviews to online publications. “We ignored the existence of the seismic fault,” he told one Web site. “Society’s value judgments have disappeared—rent seeks profit. They have destroyed the concept of public interest.”
He called for accountability. “Why does the earthquake not bring destruction to Japan but to Turkey?” he asked. “If this happened in Japan, the authorities would resign. Why did no one resign in Turkey?”
I had an appointment to meet Kimyon, but when I called to tell him I was in the area his phone had been shut off, which was weird. In Turkey, no one turns off his phone in the middle of the day. I Googled his address and saw a newspaper headline: “Ercüment Kimyon Has Been Arrested.”
It wasn’t the first time that people had tried to silence Kimyon. In March, 2002, after filing a suit to stop a paving project, he was driving home with his sixteen-year-old daughter, Deniz, when they stopped at a red light and the passenger door was pulled open. A man fired into the car. Kimyon threw his left leg over Deniz, and two bullets grazed him. In 2006, Kimyon’s car was set on fire in front of his house. In 2008, as he left the office, three men jumped him, breaking his jaw so badly that he needed a metal plate put in. That same year, a man shot him in the arm, leaving it filled with shrapnel. Most of the attacks took place in the early evening, in İskenderun’s pretty, palm-tree-lined downtown, and they all occurred after Kimyon brought cases against what he believed were corrupt activities. After one attack, the deputy chairman of an opposition political party issued a written statement implicating Mete Aslan in the violence: “All İskenderun residents know that the mayor of İskenderun is the hidden power behind this incident.” (Aslan denies that he was involved.)
Now the newspapers reported that a prosecutor had found evidence that, in 1996, Kimyon had worked on two buildings that collapsed in the earthquakes, killing forty-three people. The buildings were part of a complex called Özinci Kent, next door to İnci Kent, where Kimyon’s brother had lived. The prosecutor claimed to have documents proving that Kimyon had signed off on the construction of the buildings. There were likely additional relevant records in İskenderun’s tax office and title-deed office, but both had collapsed.
I went to Özinci Kent that night. The apartment complexes, rows of six- and seven-story buildings, were empty and dark; the windows were like a thousand black holes in the sky. In the green patches between buildings, families had pitched tents, where they brewed tea and watched over their abandoned homes. Military police in blue caps played with children nearby. Men broke chunks of concrete off their own homes with their bare hands. “Look at this!” they cried. The buildings had been made from trash and sand. I asked a young man who lived in İnci Kent if he knew anything about the two buildings that had pancaked. He pointed at two giant piles of broken concrete and curtains and couches and refrigerator doors. He showed me his phone. A picture of Kimyon, wearing a suit and a red tie, had been posted on Instagram. “This is one of the contractors,” he said. İskenderun’s most passionate advocate for proper construction rules had become one of its most vilified men, a müteahhit—a contractor.
On July 15, 2016, soldiers, some allegedly allied with the Gülenist movement, occupied the Bosporus Bridge; they bombed the parliament building in Ankara, and tried to capture Erdoğan, who was on vacation. But Erdoğan summoned his supporters to the streets with a special call to prayer, broadcast from mosques throughout the country, and he survived the attempted coup.
The insurrection was followed by a terrifying era of repression. Though Gülenists were the primary target, Kurds, liberals, and secularists suffered, too. Seventy-seven thousand people were arrested, and six thousand academics, four thousand judges and prosecutors, twenty-four thousand policemen and interior-ministry officials, seven thousand military personnel, and hundreds of governors and their staff members were fired. The government enacted a series of emergency-decree laws that increased Erdoğan’s power over the courts, effectively eviscerating them. The Party appointed inexperienced judges, prosecutors, and bureaucrats, whose only qualification was their loyalty. In 2017, through a referendum process, Erdoğan changed the country’s parliamentary system to one in which power was concentrated under the President. And, in 2018, he won the Presidency.
“The state is now such that there are ministries, there are committees, there are offices, and in the center is the President,” Can, the former judge, said. “The President says something, and the others turn it into policy. That’s why ministers don’t have the initiative—there’s no such thing as ministers as we know them in the context of parliamentary democracies. Everything is carried out through interactions with the advisers of the palace and through purely personal connections within the palace.” (Spokespeople from Erdoğan’s office declined to comment.)
Erdoğan, even after consolidating so much power, still placed tremendous importance on elections. “Erdoğan can elevate himself above other leaders of his regime on the basis of his popularity,” Esen, the professor of political science, told me. “Otherwise, he’d be an aging, out-of-touch authoritarian compared with other, younger candidates.” Before the 2018 Presidential election, Erdoğan passed a “zoning amnesty” law that exempted millions of homes from adhering to earthquake codes, in exchange for a fee. The H.D.P., a leftist party with Kurdish roots, opposed the amnesty. Garo Paylan, an H.D.P. member, nearly lost it on the parliament floor. “Imagine that you forgave a ten-story building,” he said. “A hundred of our citizens live in that ten-story building. There is an earthquake, God forbid, and those citizens are inside that building. Who will have this on their conscience?”
The zoning amnesty took effect in advance of the 2019 mayoral elections. Running against Erdoğan’s handpicked candidate for mayor of Istanbul was Ekrem İmamoğlu, a likable man who could pray at a mosque, go to a rock concert, and give a political speech on the same day. Turkish elections are not fair. Erdoğan controls almost every state institution, most of the media, and extensive charity networks. Yet Turks love to vote. Throughout the country’s history of military coups, they have always showed up for elections; today, Turkey has about an eighty-per-cent participation rate. Election Day is like a jubilee. Anyone can go watch the party heads, sitting in classrooms in local schools, count the slips of paper—observers even call out if the officials miss a vote. In 2019, Erdoğan lost Istanbul, his paradise of plunder, the city he’d ruled for twenty-five years.
I lived in Istanbul for twelve years, beginning in 2007, the year of Erdoğan’s second election. It was my home, and I still have many loved ones there. The earthquakes have haunted everyone. There was the doctor who broke down crying during our appointment, saying, “This is mass murder”; the lawyer struggling to understand Istanbul’s complex earthquake rules for her apartment, who said, “Can you imagine, this is where my son sleeps?”; the impoverished taxi-driver who flew south to help with search-and-rescue operations, and whose memory of bodies piled on the pavement silenced him mid-sentence. My landlord is from Hatay, my therapist is from İskenderun, a friend I had lunch with is from Gaziantep, the owner of my favorite kebab place is from Antakya. One morning at a café, my friends laughed a little loudly over breakfast, and the waiter stopped them. “I am from Adıyaman,” he said.
It was clear to many people that Erdoğan’s weakening of the state had culminated in the disastrous response to the earthquakes. Erdoğan had eroded the military’s independence, hampering its ability to mobilize quickly in response to disasters. He had crippled the powers of civil-society groups and municipalities. Even the Red Crescent had been tainted: after the earthquakes, it was revealed that the organization had sold two thousand and fifty tents to another nonprofit for a reported $2.4 million. (The Red Crescent said that any profits are reinvested in its humanitarian mandate.)
AFAD, the emergency-management organization, was headed by loyalists with little or no aid experience and run by a graduate of the Faculty of Theology at a religious school. After the earthquakes, many search-and-rescue teams were stranded at regional airports or separated from their equipment. And, in the crucial first hours, it was unlikely that the state organs could do anything until receiving orders from Erdoğan. “In such a system, all minds are disabled—there is only one mind,” Can, the former judge, said. “When someone acts, he puts himself at risk, he becomes responsible. Therefore, he waits for instruction from above. This is not a state, this is a non-state.” He went on, “There is just one logic here, and it is psychological—the logic is the person of Erdoğan.”
A few weeks after the earthquakes, I visited Ekrem İmamoğlu at his office, in Miniaturk, on the Golden Horn, a miniature theme-park model of the city of Istanbul, with a tiny Blue Mosque and a cute Bosporus Bridge. İmamoğlu looked grave; his office was a rush of activity. After his election, he had found his employees suffering from a lack of initiative. “The whole team looked at the political will and awaited instructions from it, as if the Presidential system had already been reflected here,” İmamoğlu told me. “No one was trying to contribute to the process with their own talent.” He thought that, in his three years in power, he had begun to revive the spirits of the city. But after the earthquakes the people of Istanbul were panicking. They believe that if a major earthquake strikes Istanbul, as geologists have predicted, they will die.
On Twitter, people were posting aerial shots of crowded middle- and lower-class neighborhoods in Istanbul which were devoid of green space, making the point that, in the event of an earthquake, there would be no escape. When experts overlaid an earthquake-risk map on a map of neighborhoods that had seen urban renewal in the past twenty years, they didn’t line up. “Most of the neighborhoods that are the most dangerous never got designated as in need of urban renewal,” Kuyucu, the sociology professor, said. “The places that were designated as urban-renewal areas—what connects them? They are profitable, higher-end areas.”
There were also concerns about the Istanbul New Airport, which had been completed in 2018; at the time, Erdoğan called it “the biggest airport in the world.” “The public does not know, for example, who the architects of the airport are,” Tezcan Karakuş Candan, the head of the Chamber of Architects in Ankara, told me. “The architect is the President, because he is the last to decide.” Celâl Şengör, a geologist, said that, in the case of a major earthquake, the New Airport would probably sustain damage. “They were going to build the runways to a certain height—they lowered that,” Yörük Işık, a geopolitical analyst at the Middle East Institute, told me. “They were going to build angled runways, which are the most optimal runways in a city with Istanbul’s winds. They promised another terminal building. None of this has happened.”
The airport had been built by members of the Gang of Five: Kolin, Cengiz, Limak, and Kalyon. Many of these companies are now in trouble, unable to pay their debts. Even before the earthquakes, Turkey was experiencing a devastating financial crisis. Many people can barely afford to eat, and at the end of 2022 the annual inflation rate was more than eighty per cent. Erdoğan refuses to raise interest rates, which would curb inflation but cripple Turkey’s construction magnates.
Işık told me that, owing to pressure from the government, banks have delayed calling in their loans. “During COVID, the banks got a special amnesty from Erdoğan,” he said. “They did not pay the central bank. Like, if I were a normal guy and I bought a car and didn’t pay what I owed, they would come and get my car. What’s the bank going to do—take the airport?”
For many years, Erdoğan’s giant projects were a source of pride among his supporters. I spent four years reporting in a pro-A.K. Party neighborhood, and by 2019 many of the Party’s supporters there were disenchanted. Where did all the money go? one of them wondered, then said, “They buried all the money in stone.”
Last December, Ekrem İmamoğlu was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for insulting the Turkish state. He has appealed the case, and remains in his role as mayor, but the sentence seemingly quashed any hope that he might run for President, as many members of the opposition had desired.
Instead, the opposition Presidential candidate will be Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the longtime leader of the C.H.P., Atatürk’s party. He is a soft-spoken Alevi (a minority Muslim sect) who has emerged as an appealingly gentle alternative to Erdoğan. Six of Turkey’s opposition parties—and İmamoğlu—have pledged to support Kılıçdaroğlu, in order to counter the A.K. Party and its alliance with the National Action Party, which is known for its nationalism, its mafia connections, and its anti-Kurdish sentiment.
In recent weeks, polls have suggested that Erdoğan is losing support. “He’s been in power twenty years,” Işık said. “An entire religious generation has passed since Erdoğan has been around. The old story is actually unsellable—they didn’t grow up with head-scarf issues or not getting jobs. They also see that the system is corrupt.”
Erdoğan’s recent history, however, suggests another possible election outcome. “What makes me scared about Erdoğan is that, if you don’t break him, he hits you back harder,” Esen said. “Yes, the earthquakes bruised him. But this kind of crisis does not always destroy authoritarians. It’s like being in a ship that hits a rock. Who distributes the life jackets? The captain.”
Ercüment Kimyon spent fifteen days in prison. His daughters, Derya, who trained as an architect, and Deniz, an urban planner, returned to work on his case. They had learned of their father’s arrest after he hadn’t texted them “Günaydın,” or “Good morning,” as he did every day. The prosecutor claimed that Kimyon was the fenni mesul on the Özinci Kent project, a kind of scientific engineer or inspector. But their father had worked on the complex only as an architect, and only in its initial years. Kimyon had been dismissed from the project after members of the building coöperative began to fear that the mayor, Mete Aslan, would penalize them for working with Kimyon. Derya, Deniz, and Kimyon’s lawyer petitioned the prosecutor to see Kimyon’s case file, and ten days into his jail term they found municipality documents that proved what they already knew: Kimyon had left before the construction of the two crushed buildings. He was released from jail. “Our father is home,” Derya texted me, with a celebration emoji.
In April, Kimyon decided to run for parliament, as a member of the Yeşil Sol (Green Left) Party, which had sprung up after the H.D.P. was threatened with a ban. It is people like him—journalists, lawyers, Kurds, architects, engineers, city planners, academics, doctors, activists, Tweeters—who have made up an archipelago of resistance for the past twenty years. An authoritarian leader may be able to prevent people from marching in the streets, but it’s harder to prevent them from filing legal cases, publishing academic papers, or providing proof of wrongdoing on Twitter. In a country of eighty-five million, there are thousands of Ercüment Kimyons—people who have continued to do their jobs at significant peril. “I am not a man of great talents,” Kimyon told me. “The system brought out this capability in me, it brought me to this place.”
In late April, Kimyon was still posting accusations of wrongdoing on Facebook. He shared a photograph of a building damaged in the earthquakes. He had pursued various lawsuits against the building, delaying its construction multiple times. It was also the home of Mete Aslan.
After Kimyon was released from jail, he seemed calm. I asked if he ever got angry. He smiled. That week, he said, he had attended a meeting with the mayor of İskenderun, Fatih Tosyalı. Tosyalı is an A.K. Party official and a son of the founder of Tosyalı Holding, an Erdoğan ally whose company specializes in making steel used in construction. In İskenderun, the name Tosyalı appears on everything from factories to mosques. Tosyalı told Kimyon that he and a local A.K. member of parliament wanted to work with Kimyon to gain insight on how to rebuild the city. “We’re going to sit together, talk about urban planning,” he said. Then he mentioned that they would also work with two former mayors: one from the A.K. Party and Mete Aslan, who had resisted so many of Kimyon’s warnings.
“What are we going to talk about with them?” Kimyon yelled. “They are the murderers of this city!” ♦
