Türkiye Earthquake Memory Project (TEMP)
Established in 2024 following the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, the Türkiye Earthquake Memory Project (TEMP) is a collaborative research initiative that investigates how earthquakes have been experienced, interpreted, represented, and remembered in Türkiye over the past century. Through this publicly accessible online repository, TEMP brings together research findings and source materials for scholars, practitioners, and wider audiences.
Positioned at the intersection of disaster studies, memory studies, and the history of the built environment, the project seeks to expand understandings of Türkiye's seismic past beyond official narratives and conventional archives by foregrounding lived experience, cultural production, and collective memory.
TEMP comprises two interconnected components: a curated digital repository of media, cultural, and artistic responses to major earthquakes, and an expanding oral history collection documenting intergenerational experiences of survival, recovery, adaptation, and resilience. Together, these materials illuminate how earthquakes reshape not only physical environments but also emotional geographies, everyday life, and collective memory.
By emphasizing the relationship between memory and the built environment, TEMP understands homes, streets, and neighborhoods as both sites where earthquake experiences unfold and places through which those experiences are remembered and transmitted across generations.
Funding: TEMP has been awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant (#435-2026-1190, 2026-2031). The project also received support between 2024 and 2026 from the Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice, an Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Development Grant (Vice-President, 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.
Partners: Université de Montréal and Manisa Celal Bayar University.
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.
