Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes how minority citizens in Antakya, Turkey, keep a record of the city (and its destruction) as an archive of ongoing state violence in the wake of 2023 earthquakes

Paper long abstract:

Cities are archives, scholars have recently claimed (e.g., Burgum 2022; Sheringham and Wentworth 2016). They are palimpsests bearing the sedimented patterns of activity, memory, and movement. Buildings, monuments, districts, and even ruins stand as physical records of past epochs, telling tales of change, decay, revision, or deliberate erasure (Hetherington 2012). But what happens when the all such layers and their material traces are obliterated through a profound rupture caused by the destruction of political or natural disasters?

This paper examines this question in post-earthquake Antakya, a city near Turkey’s border with Syria that has historically witnessed the displacement, dispossession, and enduring coexistence of Arab Orthodox, Alawi, and Jewish minorities as well as recent Syrian arrivals. Drawing on follow-up research in Antakya in the aftermath of the February 2023 earthquakes, I focus on the motivations and methods by which Antakya’s minority communities, now dispersed across and beyond the country, keep a record of the city (and its destruction) as a repertoire of past, ongoing, and anticipated state violence. I argue that they do so not only to grieve the sudden loss of a place-based history and its material traces but also to harness this loss to assert a communal existence in anticipation of future challenges. The multitemporal and collective orientation of this process allows us to rethink archival qualities and chronicling of the city beyond mere scale or scope, touching upon their very form and existence.