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Paper short abstract

On March 22, 2020, as Zagreb was adjusting to COVID-19 lockdown, an earthquake struck the city. Drawing on rapid ethnography and on recent research conducted within the Sonar-Cities project, the paper examines how individuals generate and circulate stories that impose coherence on chaos.

Paper long abstract

On March 22, 2020, as Zagreb and the rest of Croatia were adjusting to a near-total Covid-19 lockdown, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake—the strongest in 140 years—struck the city. In a single morning, citizens faced two overlapping disasters: the invisible threat of viral contagion and the immediate danger of collapsing buildings.

Drawing on rapid ethnography conducted immediately after the fact and on more recent research conducted within the Sonar-Cities participatory research-action project (Horizon Europe, Disaster-Resilient Societies), this paper examines how individuals generate and circulate stories that impose coherence on chaos, transforming catastrophe into a meaningful narrative within broader cultural logics. Narratives, it argues, function as active survival strategies, shaping reasoning, guiding action, and embedding crisis into collective memory.

Namely, at the height of the quake, pandemic-related concerns vanished as survival instincts, embodied practices, and fragments of remembered advice dictated immediate responses. Yet as people gathered outside in the cold morning snow, the “familiar” Covid-19 framework quickly resurfaced: mask-wearing, distancing, and anxieties about contagion revealed how narratives of crisis become layered and internalized. Misinformation added further complexity. Rumors of a stronger, imminent quake spread rapidly across social media, prompting many to abandon homes that lockdown regulations had marked as the only safe places.

This case study situates Zagreb’s earthquake-pandemic convergence within the wider comparative framework of disaster narratives. By drawing on oral accounts and testimonies, it explores the narrative and normative reasoning people employed to make sense of the unimaginable collision of catastrophes.