Türkiye Earthquake Memory Project
Türkiye Earthquake Memory Project (TEMP), is a collaborative online repository that documents how Türkiye understands, presents, and remembers its past 100 years of earthquakes. Positioned at the intersection of disaster studies, the history of the built environment, and memory studies, the repository offers new ways of understanding Türkiye’s earthquake past by moving beyond what official narratives and canonical archives provide.
By presenting newspaper coverage spanning a century and centering survivors’ voices through oral history interviews, TEMP constructs a multi-layered narration of earthquake history. These materials reveal how earthquakes reshape not only physical landscapes but also emotional geographies and collective memory. The built environment—homes, streets, neighbourhoods—emerges as both a causality and a carrier of memory, central to how individuals and communities experience loos, navigate reconstruction and sustain everyday.
TEMP consists of two interconnected components: a curated archive of newspaper articles tracing the evolution of media narratives around major earthquakes, and an expanding oral history collection that captures intergenerational testimonies of survival, adaptation, and resilience. These voices illuminate diverse forms of emotional, social, and organizational resilience often overlooked in institutional memory.
Despite Türkiye’s frequent and devastating seismic events, there remains no comprehensive, participatory, and accessible archive that systematically documents the societal and spatial impacts of these disasters. TEMP addresses this gap by foregrounding human-centered, spatially-grounded and sustainable approaches to archiving disaster memory.
This project invites scholars and practitioners in architecture, urban design, planning, geography, and municipal governance to engage with TEMP as a resource for understanding how spatial memory and built environments shape—and are shaped by—earthquake experiences. It promotes experiencesharing and academic dialogue on how disaster memory can inform more inclusive and resilient urban futures.
The project is supported in part by funding from the Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice, an Internal Social Science and Humanities Development Grant (VP Research and Innovation), the Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering (SURE) Program (Faculty of Engineering) and the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Ipek Türeli
Collaborators: Dr. Faika Çelik, Dr. Gonzalo Lizarralde
Researcher and Coordinator: Fatma Özdoğan
Undergraduate Student Assistants: Andi Lin, Michael Salib, Karya Yilmaz
Academic Consultants: Dr. Osman Balaban, Dr. Damla İşman Haznedaroğlu, Dr. Emrah Keser, Dr. Christie Rowe, Dr. Zeynep Gül Ünal, Dr. Yazhou Xie
Copyright statement:
The maps, interviews and commentary on this website have been created by the Türkiye Earthquake Memory Project (TEMP) team and our collaborators above. You are free to use this content for research, educational or other non-commercial purposes, with attribution. Other content on the site not created by the TEMP team is either in the public domain or used under fair dealing purposes and it is the sole responsibility of the user to determine whether any permissions may be required for the re-use or distribution of such materials. If you are concerned that material on this site infringes upon your rights under copyright law and is not covered by fair dealing or other limitation or exception, please contact us.
