Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how eternity emerges through repetition, care, and the motif of rising “seven times” in post-earthquake Antakya. Tracing everyday practices and saintly presence that sustain life amid ruin via ethnography, it charts temporalities beyond linear recovery or theological assurance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how experiences of eternity emerge in post-earthquake Antakya, Turkey, through idioms of repetition, suspension, and care rather than through linear narratives of recovery or resilience. Following the devastating earthquakes of February 2023, Antakya was widely declared finished—materially destroyed and affectively exhausted. Against this sense of irrevocable loss, many inhabitants responded with a different refrain: Antakya has risen from ruins “seven times.” While anchored in historical memory, this formulation gestures beyond chronology. The number seven operates as a shared metaphor for infinity, evoking a temporality in which destruction and renewal, existence and nonexistence, unfold together.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the paper traces how this non-linear temporality is lived in the disaster’s aftermath. I focus on the afterlives of the Antakyan saint Habib-i Neccar, whose dispersed presence—across shrine, mosque, mountain, and story—continues to orient everyday practices amid ruin. In damaged landscapes, small gestures such as tending plants beside tents, lighting candles at broken sites, or invoking saints’ names sustain life in a protracted present shaped by loss and recursive violence.

Situating these practices alongside local reflections on fate, preordination, and prophesied time, the paper shows how disaster brings into view temporal registers that exceed secular anticipation and theological assurance alike. Eternity appears here as an immanent rhythm, encountered through repetition and care. Attending to these fragile practices invites a reconsideration of what it means to remain human after catastrophe: a condition sustained through relational labor that binds finite lives to enduring, unknowable durations.