With such an enormous earthquake moving between so many large cities, plus aftershocks, it seems difficult to put a precise location on the epicentre of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that just hit Türkiye and the Syrian borders. I see Kahramanmaraş mentioned often, Antep, Malatya. When I woke up to the first news of the disaster, the first name I saw was Nurdağı, just west of Gaziantep. Nurdağı is a small city I cycled through the other month, about 5km from where this photo was taken. I went round a mountain highway bend and into a fast descent, down towards those plains you see beginning here. I stopped in Nurdağı for soup. The name of the city means roughly, though it sounds cleaner in Turkish, “divine light mountain”. It is the easternmost mountain and city along the strip of mountains that has Osmaniye to its west. In the fashion of cycling and pondering that make up much of touring by bike, I decided the name probably relates to it being the first place, half way up the mountainside, to see the dawn sun rising over the plains south and eastwards.
An earthquake
An earthquake
With such an enormous earthquake moving between so many large cities, plus aftershocks, it seems difficult to put a precise location on the epicentre of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that just hit Türkiye and the Syrian borders. I see Kahramanmaraş mentioned often, Antep, Malatya. When I woke up to the first news of the disaster, the first name I saw was Nurdağı, just west of Gaziantep. Nurdağı is a small city I cycled through the other month, about 5km from where this photo was taken. I went round a mountain highway bend and into a fast descent, down towards those plains you see beginning here. I stopped in Nurdağı for soup. The name of the city means roughly, though it sounds cleaner in Turkish, “divine light mountain”. It is the easternmost mountain and city along the strip of mountains that has Osmaniye to its west. In the fashion of cycling and pondering that make up much of touring by bike, I decided the name probably relates to it being the first place, half way up the mountainside, to see the dawn sun rising over the plains south and eastwards.