Two years after devastating earthquakes struck Turkey’s Hatay province, many of the region’s churches remain in ruins, leaving the local Christian community without vital spaces for worship and community life.
For Father Nikola Papasoğlu, the grief is still unbearable. “I try not to go there,” he says, talking about the St. Nicholas Church in the city centre of İskenderun, a coastal district of Hatay province in southern Turkey. “Seeing our church in ruins gives me a sorrow that I still can’t handle.”
The 150-year-old church, once the central worshipping place for the district’s Greek Orthodox community, is still partially in ruins two years after the twin earthquakes that hit Turkey and neighboring Syria in February 2023. No timeline has been set for the church’s reconstruction or reopening.
St. Nicholas is not Hatay’s only place of worship waiting for renovation or reconstruction. While reconstruction has started in some mosques and symbol buildings, almost none of the dozens of churches affected by the earthquakes have returned to use.
According to the Culture and Tourism Ministry, 293 cultural assets in the province, including mosques, churches and synagogues, were damaged by earthquakes. Among them are Hatay’s quake-hit churches, which are still waiting for their revival. Political and financial obstacles are both delaying reconstruction efforts.
Members of Hatay’s Orthodox community – the largest Christian group in the province – accept that rebuilding their historically significant churches isn’t easy given all the delicate work required and its likely cost.
One of the deadliest disasters in modern Turkey’s history, the February 2023 earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people and left millions homeless. The Antioch Greek Orthodox Church in Antakya, located on one of the most popular streets in Hatay’s main city, was one of the thousands of buildings in ruins in the morning after the disaster.
“Our church has been one of the places where our members and other people from Antakya turn to when they’re in need,” says Father Dimitri Doğum, recalling another earthquake that hit Antakya in 1997. After that disaster, people spent days in the church and its grounds to feel safer.
“We hoped for the same protection when the last earthquake hit,” Doğum says. “The first thing we tried to do after the disaster was to reach our church, but it was already in ruins.”
It took Doğum four days after the first quake in February 2023 to reach the ruins of his church. Two years later, like Father Dimitri, many Orthodox Christians remain in limbo – waiting, working, and hoping for the return of their places of worship.
Doğum’s goldsmith’s shop, which is now located in a shipping container – a ‘temporary’ solution for housing or a place of work for hundreds of thousands in the earthquake zone – is located just a few hundred meters away from the church.
Some rebuilding work is taking place on one side of the surrounding area, once the heart of the city centre with its historic stone buildings and narrow alleys. Yet the rest is still in ruins, punctuated by gaps from demolished structures. Many buildings in the area were under conservation orders, and partially due to the time-consuming nature of sensitive restoration, construction work has started in only a few of them.
Historic landmarks
The Antioch Greek Orthodox Church, the highlight of the old city centre, was once one of the most resplendent buildings in the neighborhood. But in the days after the earthquakes, it was only recognisable from the trees on its grounds. Almost all of its roof and part of the walls collapsed, as did the shops surrounding the church.
Architect Buse Ceren Gül remembers that in those initial days, everyone around the country and the world was shocked by the images of destruction and wanted to help. When one of her colleagues warned her that those people wouldn’t be there for long, she found the comment a little bitter.
Two years later, sitting in her office, she says: “My friend was right. Everyone has left. We are alone. We have no-one besides each other.”
Gül, a young architect in her early 30s, was born and raised in Antakya, and she works with the Orthodox community as they rebuild some of the churches, including the Antioch Greek Orthodox Church. Her role involves fundraising and dealing with bureaucracy as well as the technical side of the projects.
Gül is not a Christian; the path that brought her here began two years before the earthquakes when she carried out a building survey in the church. Files from that project were the first and only thing Gül saved from her office, which was also heavily damaged by the earthquakes.
“A friend of mine entered the building despite all the risk,” she says. “I just told him to save the church files. It was essential for our city. Of course, it was important to the Orthodox community, but it was also the heart of the city centre.”
When asked why reconstruction or renovation of churches has stalled, Gül answers that some of the delay stems from the detailed nature of the work, which involves rebuilding or renovating structures with historical importance.
“We are trying to create something from almost nothing,” she says. Almost none of the historic religious buildings in Hatay, except a few, had structural plans or records. “Searching for necessary information and finding those [plans] have been difficult,” Gül continues. “Ultimately, we are trying to recreate historical buildings with current technology and data. It’s normal that it takes time.”
Another reason for the delay in reconstructing or renovating historical buildings is the varying ownership status. Historical mosques in the province belong to the Directorate of General Foundations under the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, while private foundations own most churches.
“This comes with different bureaucratic processes,” Gül says. In order to get the necessary permits from the municipality, her team needs to obtain approvals from several institutions.
“When you consider reviewing the demand coming from each one, it takes a lot of time,” Gül explained. “And we are not the only ones. With the caseload they have, the process gets longer.”
On top of all those issues, like many other things, bringing churches back to life comes at a price. Gül’s team received a grant from the Ministry of Culture in May 2023, but it only helped with a portion of the costs. The church’s foundation, as the owner of the building, also contributed, “But I can mainly say that we are taking care of our own costs,” Gül says. “That’s what we can do for Antakya.”
But many in the community believe the money is not the only reason behind the delay. Although most do not want to discuss this openly, several Christian residents of Hatay, speaking on condition of anonymity, say they have long faced bureaucratic challenges and subtle forms of discrimination – barriers, they argue, that have persisted in the aftermath of the earthquakes.
Even though she doesn’t want to mention a specific number since the costs and necessities fluctuate constantly, Gül points out the high cost that will come with the reconstruction of historic buildings in Hatay. “We’ll need a lot of money,” she says.
Limited support
Fortunately, the Antioch Greek Orthodox Church was included on the World Monuments Fund’s watch list for 2025. The fund will support the reconstruction work both technically and financially, according to Gül, who is also a fund representative. Another contributor to the process will be the Orthodox Patriarch in Lebanon.
In the case of the renovation of St. George Church in İskenderun, the UN Development Programme provided the budget for most of the renovation work. In Altınözü, one of Hatay’s districts bordering Syria, St. Georgios Church was recently visited by a committee from Europa Nostra and the European Investment Bank to determine possible support for renovations. In all of those cases, Turkish government support is either nonexistent or limited.
“Since the beginning, they [the government officials] believed that we had the money to rebuild our churches,” says one of the community members involved in the post-earthquake bureaucracy, speaking anonymously.
“I’ll go back and try to make deals with the state, and I don’t want to make things harder,” he says, explaining the reason for his anonymity.
According to the community members, the state and most of the citizens in Turkey have a prejudice against Christian communities stemming from the limited interaction between different religious groups.
“They mostly believe that we should be blonde and blue-eyed since we are Christians,” he says, laughing. In contrast to those common beliefs, most Orthodox people in Hatay have dark skin and dark hair, resembling other Middle Eastern ethnic groups. Like many others in the region, including Alawites, Sunnis and Jews, their mother tongue is Arabic.
“When it comes to money, people in Turkey tend to believe that minorities have secret treasures or a direct channel for foreign funds,” he continues. “That’s why they’ve been hesitant to give us any money even though we need it so much. In addition to this, we also struggle with their incapability of managing this devastating situation.”
Temporary solutions
For the last two years, the Orthodox community, like others, has been dealing with the uncertainty of constantly changing rules, regulations, and practices in the earthquake zone. The earthquake zone consists of 11 provinces. Four of them – Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Malatya, and Adıyaman – suffered the most destruction.
Millions of citizens in these provinces have spent the last two years in temporary housing. While the conditions were already difficult, many have found the bureaucracy required for adaptations, or applications for aid or changes in the legal status of buildings a further challenge.
Another member of the Orthodox community accepts this isn’t just a problem for minorities, but doubts it affects everyone at the same level. “They [the government] were unprepared,” this elderly member of the church says: “They didn’t have enough money to compensate and rebuild the losses, and when it comes to us, they tend to be less generous.”
Members of the Orthodox community who spoke with Inside Turkey on the condition of anonymity feared possible reprisal from the state or the government if they shared their criticism openly. Most say that discrimination has gradually lessened in the last 15 to 20 years, but almost all felt it continued at some level.
The Metropolitan Municipality of Hatay told Inside Turkey that the reconstruction of cultural heritage buildings is mostly not under their jurisdiction. The head of the municipality’s culture and tourism department, Abdullah Dinç, stresses that churches have their own foundations and those foundations are in charge of the restoration work. “If they demand it, we provide support,” Dinç says.
The Hatay Governor’s Office told Inside Turkey that restoration and reconstruction work has started in 82 historic buildings, including churches, but was unable to specify how many of the latter or when works would be completed.
Social fabric
Before the earthquakes, Orthodox communities in Hatay province all had their own churches in the districts where they were based. It takes at least an hour to drive between most of those churches. Currently, all except one are either still in ruins or only just beginning reconstruction.
The church of St. George in coastal İskenderun is now the only standing Orthodox church in the province. The small church was not the primary venue for Sunday services prior to the earthquakes and was mainly used for mid-week services. It was also a popular shrine among non-Christian communities, especially during Hidirellez, a festival that heralds the arrival of spring throughout the Turkic world with religious meaning for some.
At the beginning of a Sunday service in late January, just ten people were inside the church. Most of them were in their 60s or 70s. The few children in the hall didn’t seem to mind not being in bed or watching cartoons on a weekend morning. Carrying the cross, candlesticks and censers in their special costumes, they seemed to enjoy their duties.
The number of people in the church increased as time passed, and the community spent time in the garden after the ceremony. They caught up with each other and paid their respects to one of the families who held a funeral in the church that week.
The community expects that St. George’s church, which has cracks on its east-west axis, will undergo renovation after the Easter holiday. With the help of the UN, they found the funds and are now waiting for the final approval for their project. When the work starts, Sunday services will be moved to the temporary hall they’ve created in the church’s courtyard.
“You could have waited until our wedding,” one young couple joked to Father Nikola about the renovations after the Sunday service. While enjoying the local coffee with him a couple of minutes later in the yard, “Churches are not just buildings,” he says. “They are a part of our people’s lives.”
“When a child is born,” he continues. “Parents bring them to the church, and we baptise them. They get married here. They hold funerals for their loved ones. Even though it’s not religious, there is a bond between churches and the community, and also with the non-Christian ones.”
Father Dimitri says that the idea of not being able to see their beloved churches again hurts the elderly most, and the situation accelerates the exodus of the younger generation.
Gül believes this can be reversed but accepts that it requires a lot of action. “Antakya is like a person,” she says, using the general name for the region used by locals.
“The new buildings won’t bring back what we lost,” she says. “But if our churches stand again, at least a part of Antakya’s soul will remain.”
When asked if it hurts the community while some of the mosques are rising, while many say yes, Father Nikola says no.
“It would have been the same in Greece,” he says. “As a country with a Christian majority, they’d have repaired the churches at first. It’s a case of priorities: we have fewer members than any other historical mosques around. But it doesn’t change the fact that we still need our churches.”
Burcu Özkaya Günaydın contributed to this article with additional reporting