The Map of What Was Lost

i.The Old City, Before

Kahramanmaraş is an old place sitting on a young fault. The city was founded in its present shape in the 14th century, when the Dulkadiroğlu Beylik raised the citadel — Maraş Kalesi — on the rocky outcrop above the plain and the first imperial mosques and madrasas grew up around its skirts. The neighbourhoods that the new study identifies as the historic core — Ekmekçi, Kurtuluş, Turan, Divanlı, Kayabaşı, Yörükselim, Gazipaşa, Fevzipaşa, and İsa Divanlı — are mostly what survives, in stone and timber, of the late Ottoman city. The Halep Vilayet Salnamesi of 1889–1890 counted nearly six thousand households in these mahalleler; by 1916 the number was approaching eight and a half thousand. The civil architecture that survived to be registered as cultural heritage by the Adana and Gaziantep Koruma Bölge Kurulları is overwhelmingly the work of this period — the late 18th century through 1918 — and it is what the new survey set out to count after the disaster.

The street pattern was tight. Kahramanmaraş's traditional houses are two- and three-storey timber-framed structures set behind walled courtyards, the avlu and bahçe that defined domestic life across Ottoman Anatolia. Inside the courtyards were fig trees, vines, the deep wells the local geology made possible, and the small architectural elements — fountains, paved thresholds, climbing roses on a trellis — that the academic literature now calls "cultural landscape components." This is the urban tissue that lay over the East Anatolian Fault on the morning of 6 February.

ii.What Seventy-Five Per Cent Means

The Abacıoğlu Gitmiş and Avcı study examined the 201 registered immovable cultural assets in a 600-hectare area drawn around the historic centre. The damage figures, drawn from the assessment reports of the Çevre, Şehircilik ve İklim Değişikliği Bakanlığı, the Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü, and the Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı's Rölöve ve Anıtlar Müdürlüğü, are these: thirty-two of the buildings were destroyed outright, one hundred and nineteen were severely damaged, thirty-six were moderately damaged, and only fourteen — seven per cent of the total — were lightly affected.

By building type, the picture is harsher still in some categories. The largest group, the 163 registered civil architectural works, lost thirty-one outright with another ninety severely damaged — nearly three quarters of the city's protected late-Ottoman house stock either gone or unfit to stand. The religious buildings form a category of their own: of the twenty-three registered mosques and prayer halls in the study area, every single one was assessed as severely damaged. None collapsed, but none came through intact either. The seven historic hamams, five bazaar structures, two hans, and the one surviving medrese in the dataset fared variably; the hamams showed the widest spread of outcomes, from total destruction (one) to light damage (one), suggesting that older bath buildings, with their thick masonry domes, were more sensitive to the specifics of site than to the citywide shaking pattern.

A walk through Ekmekçi or Kurtuluş in the months after the quake was, in effect, a walk through a debris field of nineteenth-century timber and stone — the buildings the city had spent a hundred and thirty years calling its own.

iii.The Map the Researchers Drew

The study's central contribution is not the raw count — those figures were already in the assessment reports — but the spatial pattern. Using two techniques from the standard toolkit of spatial statistics, Kernel Density analysis and the Getis-Ord G* local autocorrelation statistic, the authors tested whether the damage in the historic core was randomly distributed or whether it formed statistically meaningful clusters. The answer was unambiguous.

At the 95–99 per cent confidence level, the densest concentrations of destroyed and severely damaged buildings were found in the Ekmekçi and Kurtuluş mahalleler — the streets immediately downhill from the citadel, the heart of the late-Ottoman residential city. Turan and Kayabaşı showed clear secondary clusters at the same significance level. Outside the historic core, the damage thinned and scattered into statistically random noise — not because those neighbourhoods were untouched, but because the registered cultural assets there were too sparsely distributed to form a pattern. The cold spots — neighbourhoods where the surviving cultural assets clustered in better condition — fell in Yörükselim and Şehit Evliya, on the outer edge of the old city.

The geographical reading the authors offer is the natural one: the densest losses fell where the densest concentration of registered late-Ottoman fabric had been to begin with. The fault did not pick out the heritage. The heritage was simply where the city had lived longest, on the oldest ground, in the most fragile materials. The damage map and the historical-density map are, on inspection, very nearly the same map.

iv.What Lies Beneath the Rubble

The paper's quieter observation is the one most likely to matter for what gets rebuilt. When the timber-framed houses of Ekmekçi and Kurtuluş came down, they came down on top of their own courtyards. The narrow walled avlu, the fig tree, the wellhead, the patterned threshold stones, the climbing roses — what Esra Abacıoğlu Gitmiş, working in landscape architecture rather than structural engineering, has been calling the city's "cultural landscapes" — disappeared at the same instant as the walls that defined them. The protected list captured the buildings; it did not capture the gardens. So when the buildings fell, the gardens went unrecorded into the debris stream.

This is the loss that will be hardest to read about, ten years from now, in any account derived only from the assessment forms. The trees and the wellheads and the inner courtyards were the fine grain of the city's domestic memory. A reconstruction that puts the walls back up around an empty rectangle of new concrete — a courtyard restored as form without content — will be a different city from the one that fell. The authors are explicit on this point: the buildings and their landscape components are not separable, and any restoration framework that treats them as separable will reproduce only half of what was there.

v.What Restoration Means Now

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced in early 2026 that 377 damaged foundation cultural assets across the wider Kahramanmaraş region had been entered into a restoration pipeline, with approximately TL 3 billion (roughly USD 90 million) committed to date across the eleven-province affected zone. In Kahramanmaraş centre itself the headline projects are well advanced. The Ulu Camii — the Great Mosque begun by the Dulkadiroğlu Beylik in the 15th century and substantially completed under Alaüddevle Bey in the late 1490s — was reopened for worship in March 2025 after an eighteen-month restoration; Maraş Kalesi, the citadel itself, is targeted for completion in summer 2026; the Tarihi Kapalı Çarşı, the Covered Bazaar at the foot of the citadel, is being restored shop by shop, with 140 units in the active programme and a 37-person specialist team of stone, wood, plaster, and injection conservators on site.

The Abacıoğlu Gitmiş and Avcı paper makes a set of recommendations that read as a careful intervention into the policy conversation rather than as a list of demands. The four neighbourhoods that registered as statistically significant hot spots — Ekmekçi, Kurtuluş, Turan, and Kayabaşı — should, the authors argue, be formally designated as priority conservation zones, and any restoration framework for them should be holistic rather than building-by-building. They warn against the temptation, in cities that have just absorbed this scale of destruction, to clear the historic fabric for rapid TOKİ-led residential development that does not match the local idiom; new construction in the old quarters, where it has to happen, should be in conversation with the surviving cultural-landscape character. They argue, finally, for the principle of yaşatarak koruma — "conservation through living use" — over the alternative of turning the surviving fabric into a museum quarter that nobody lives in.

The map the researchers have produced will not bring back the timber houses of Ekmekçi or the courtyards under them. What it does is give the planners, and the residents, a precise document of what the disaster did and where. The next twenty years of restoration in Kahramanmaraş — and in the wider arc of historic cities along the East Anatolian Fault, all of them sitting on the same active geology — will be better for having it.