Nicosia- After exhausting myself in the best possible way covering the presidential election here, I was back at the hotel up very late merely thinking about the story I was planning to write the next day ie today for Australia-based The Redline Podcast and participate in a Zoom© call with members of the podcast. Bothered that for some reason I’m not allowed to stream Disney+ here on the island to watch The Simpsons I was laying in the dark futzing around trying to find decent Youtube Simpsons compilations when suddenly the bed started moving across the floor of my hotel room. At first I couldn’t tell whether I was imagining the sensation from being so tired or if it was real.
I then stood up and could feel the entire building shift side to side atop tectonic plates grinding past one another on the earth’s molten crust. I didn’t know whether to run out into the cold or stand under the lintel of the doorway. it was after 3am and raining out. The hotel was shaking for a solid minute at least. I got dressed and scurried down to the lobby where I met the hotel’s owner who also got dressed and was totally spooked. He quickly ascertained the quake originated in Turkey via a Cypriot government site of some sort or another. Ww debated waiting outside to see if any aftershocks hit but after calmly talking for about 30 minutes we both decided to retire upstairs but thought it best not to use the elevator. He said the Cypriot source said the magnitude here on the island was 3.8. I could live I that I supposed. Still was too nervous to go back to sleep though because the sheer power of the quake exposed my own personal vulnerabilities on this trip which is meant to be a confidence rebuilding exercise writ large across the world. I was shook in every since of the term.
Then I wake up to the catastrophic news of the devastation that took place and was still taking place in Anatolia and parts of the Levant. Everyone I reached out to told me they were too far from the epicentre to be affected. A journo friend in Istanbul told me he didn’t feel a thing. A friend in northeastern Syria told me his whole neighbourhood went out into the street to wait it out but in the end no buildings collapsed and there were no casualties. A friend in Athens told me he was way too far away.
But then there were the headlines. The death kept climbing with every refresh of Google News it seemed like. It is or was 3000 at the time of this posting. I think of all those I’ve had the fortune of meeting in that realm over the past 25 years. Cyprus was spared any observable structural damage and my version of events seems utterly trite by comparison. But for the peoples of Turkey, Syria and Kurdistan this is far from over. MaŞallah.
