Quakes Destroy. People Rebuild.

She wanted to retrieve her medicine, a hairbrush and a photograph from her apartment.

It was in 2009, a couple of days after an earthquake flattened L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, in central Italy. The authorities had closed the city to residents, but the woman and her sister had sneaked in. I found her staring up at a midcentury building that the quake had somehow sheared horizontally.

From afar, we measure catastrophes like the calamity in Turkey and Syria by totaling the numbers of dead and buildings destroyed. Reports describe a spectacularly wide disaster zone, recovery efforts that are too slow, and hundreds of thousands of people in the cold without homes, food, drinking water or medical supplies.

It is too much to process, the loss of lives and history. The tiny Jewish community in Antakya, in central Turkey, dates back 2,500 years. The head of the community and his wife both died in the quake. The city’s synagogue is now gone.

The Habibi Neccar Mosque collapsed, too. The mosque dates back to 638. It was a church and a mosque, depending on who ruled the city.

The biblical city of Antioch, Antakya is also where the word “Christian” was supposedly first used. The Apostle Peter led the church there before establishing a church in Rome. Paul preached in Antioch. The quake collapsed the Saint Paul Orthodox Church, as well.

The urge to urbanize is ingrained in us because cities are life. And like other forms of life, they need constant care. In Turkey, that clearly did not happen. After an earthquake

in 1999 killed 17,000, building codes were introduced and updated. But the authorities pretended not to notice developers who ignored seismic regulations, and they failed to check projects that supposedly complied with the rules. In 2018, Turkey’s government granted amnesty to developers who violated the codes in return for fees, without requiring that they actually make their buildings safe.

According to The Associated Press, a Turkish government agency has acknowledged that more than half of all buildings in the country do not meet earthquake standards.

L’Aquila, like Antakya, lies in an earthquake zone. A quake in L’Aquila in 1349 killed 800 residents; another in 1703 killed more than 3,000.

The quake in 2009 killed more than 300 people, destroyed hundreds of historical buildings and left tens of thousands homeless. Italian authorities rushed to resettle survivors in tents and temporary housing on the outskirts of town and on the coast, promising to rebuild.

But these costly, cramped settlements, disconnected from transit and civic life, became permanent; there were inquiries into contractors’ links with the mafia; and L’Aquila’s recovery stalled.

You may ask about the logic of rebuilding time and again in these risky places. The notion comes up around climate change. Scientists predict large-scale migrations from zones where rising seas, floods, droughts and extreme weather will make life difficult. Already, climate change has displaced millions of people.

But logic is not the point. Cities are only nominally bricks and mortar. To residents they are repositories of a hairbrush and a photograph, collective threads of a social fabric that, over time, weave together a life, a family, a history, a neighborhood, a community. The least government can be expected to do is ensure that buildings and streets are up to code and that cities answer to the needs of their residents, not to developers and politicians. But in much of the world that is the exception.

When I returned to L’Aquila a few years after the quake, I found a group of men chatting in the empty Piazza Duomo. One of them, a retired lawyer named Antonio Antonacci, told me that his house had been lost in the quake. He moved in with relatives an hour or so away.

Every week he made the trip back to the piazza so he could meet his old friends who, like him, had scattered.

The city was still a shambles. But it was home.

Cities need constant care, but Turkey did not provide that.