Architect aims to rebuild a church and help restore its multicultural past

Antakya, Türkiye — Architect Buis Ceren Gul is on a mission: restore the 166-year-old Greek Orthodox church that has long been a symbol of his hometown’s multicultural past. He believes the mostly ruined church will be renovated after the earthquake in southern Türkiye It will help local people reconnect with their city three years in advance.

7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, 2023, and a few hours later, it was one of Türkiye’s worst disasters. In Antakya, the earthquake destroyed much of the historic city centre.

After years of planning, campaigning and fundraising, Gul’s team recently pulled St Paul’s Church out of 5 metres (16 ft) of debris.

“The old town is central to the earliest memories of anyone who grew up here,” Gul, 34, told The Associated Press as he strolled around the church.

“‘Did we disappear?’ I asked myself when I saw that place for the first time after the earthquake,” she said.

earthquake destroyed It damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings in Türkiye, killing more than 53,000 people. Another 6,000 people were killed in neighbouring Syria.

Before the earthquake, an estimated 10,000 Christians lived in Hatay province, a small share of the total population but one of the largest Christian concentrations in Turkey outside Istanbul.

Antakya was one of the most affected cities, with the destruction threatening to obliterate one of its oldest streets, Saray Avenue, which was a centre for Christians, Muslims and Jews of various denominations. The street is home to the Greek Orthodox St Paul’s Church, which belongs to the Arabic-speaking community.

Gul, who belongs to the Alevi Muslim community, said that, like others in Antakya, the neighbourhood has become “unrecognisable to its residents”. “But getting the old city back on its feet could prove that Antakya’s roots can be preserved once again.”

Gul was already studying and working on the renovation of St Paul’s Church before the earthquake. Of the 293 cultural heritage sites damaged in the province, the church is one of the few that already had approved architectural drawings, which Gul was drafting.

“When I was working on those plans, one of my mentors asked me to draw in such a way that the church could be rebuilt if it collapsed,” Gul said. “I never imagined that this grand structure could actually be destroyed, but I drafted a point-by-point plan.”

Known as Antioch in the Middle Ages, Antakya is a Biblical city dating back to the sixth century BC. Over the centuries, its Hellenistic, Roman and Ottoman layers – and its diverse ethnic, religious and linguistic communities – survived at least five earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater since 115 AD, disasters that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed much of the city.

The Church of St Paul, part of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, on the east bank of the Orontes River, was completely rebuilt in 1900 after being destroyed by an earthquake in 1872.

After rescuing reconstruction plans from the ruins of his office shortly after the earthquake, Gul secured the support of the World Monuments Fund, a non-profit that works to preserve endangered cultural heritage.

With the Fund’s technical and financial contributions, Gul’s team cleared tonnes of debris and set aside the stones they found. The team continues project planning and technical assessment for the reconstruction phase, but work on the site is halted until more funding comes in.

“We used to be a financially self-sufficient foundation that was able to help needy families,” Fadi Hurigil, president of the Greek Orthodox Church Foundation of Antakya, which is overseeing the reconstruction project, told the AP. “After the earthquake we lost 95% of our income.”

Rents from church-owned shops on Sarai Avenue, which catered to tourists, provided the church with its main income. Hurigil said reopening them would be important to help the congregation generate income, as post-earthquake monetary aid from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus and other donors has diminished.

Since the beginning of the year, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change has contracted a company to redevelop the shops.

who once lived in the courtyard of St Paul’s Church and the Tavern Avenue district.

The main challenge for Antioch Orthodox Christians is the return of those who once lived in the courtyard of St Paul’s Church and the Tavern Avenue district. Most of the houses in the historic city centre are still in ruins, with most of the city’s Greek Orthodox community displaced from their ancestral homes.

Hurigil said 370 to 400 families lived in central Antakya before the earthquake, of which only 90 have returned, although others come to the city for memorial ceremonies.

“The community’s greatest need to be able to return to Antakya is the reconstruction of their homes and commercial properties,” he said.

Many of the Christian Orthodox community with damaged or destroyed properties live in small districts of Hatay Province or nearby towns outside Antakya, in the absence of a comprehensive urban plan for the restoration of Antakya’s historic centre.

Evelyn Huseinoglu is one of them. He had a family home just a few minutes’ walk down Sarai Avenue that had been rebuilt just before the earthquake.

It suffered only minor damage in the earthquake, but in the absence of decisive urban planning, the family found it economically risky to restore and resettle the house. They are living in Arsuz, a three-hour drive from Antakya, which used to be their summer home.

Residents and community leaders who have lived in the city for generations fear that the extended displacement of various religious and ethnic groups from the city will erode the long-established intercultural harmony that characterises Antakya.

“We grew up on Saray Avenue; there is no Saray Avenue anymore,” says Dmitry Dogum, a 59-year-old official of St Paul’s Church, whose family has lived in Antakya for the past 400 years. “So many people have already left the city, and it may take another five years for Antakya to recover.”

Dogum, who is Christian, fears that his son and the children of his Sunni Muslim friends will not be able to form the kind of friendships and interreligious dialogue that he enjoyed when he spent long boyhood days playing together on the street.

“People have gone now,” Dogum said. “My fear is that we will lose the culture of living together.”

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