Türkiye in one Photo: Hopes & Fears

The first week of school we went over procedures with the kids. One procedure that caught my attention was the Earthquake Drill. We have to be ready for earthquakes here. The ground often shakes.

Here's what we do: a siren sounds for 30 seconds. When it sounds, we duck under our desks and protect our heads. When the siren stops, I lead the class out the front door to the edge of campus and follow a wall to a parking lot, where we wait for ... aftershocks, clearance for return, I haven't figured this out yet.

I have experienced one earthquake already, the week before school started. It wasn't much. The building shook for about 15 seconds, and my swivel chair kept moving around under me. But I wasn't knocked around or anything.

I saw the tweet below this week. For me, it combines fascination and fear. I'm fascinated by the history and art that has shook this landscape for thousands of years. People moving in and out, empires rising and falling, and art that is ancient, then ur-ancient, then whatever is more ancient than that.

But the ground shakes, and every few hundred years, all the buildings get knocked down, only to be rebuilt by the next empire, if they come back at all. The Temple of Diana in nearby Ephesus was one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World. A few hewed-off columns are all that is left to see today.

Ephesus and Miletus were once among the businest port cities of the Roman Empire. Today each city is a mile or so from the coast, its harbors silted in by the rivers carrying the shaken remains of mountains.

The waves in the mosaic below are awesome. But so is the fact that mosaic remains intact. It's too soon to say that Art > Geology. I'm pretty sure that Geology is undefeated in world history. But it shows the enduring culture that makes Türkiye so endlessly fascinating.

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