Three Years After the Antakya Earthquakes, Displacement Has Not Ended—It Is Expanding

Introduction

On December 27, 2025, as the third anniversary of the February 2023 earthquakes in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria approached, a grand ceremony was staged in Antakya, Turkey, the center of Hatay province. It was attended by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan alongside senior dignitaries including his key ally, Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli, and Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Murat Kurum.

As the president handed a young girl the keys to the 455,000th housing unit built by the Housing Development Administration of the Republic of Turkey (TOKİ) across the quake-ravaged region, the message conveyed was clear: reconstruction is advancing at scale and the government has delivered on its promises.1 The backdrop to the ceremony, the city center and the Old Town along the route of the presidential convoy, had been hastily prepared to present the impression that life in Antakya and the wider earthquake region is “returning to normal.”

Reconstruction as Displacement

What we observe in Antakya is “reconstruction as displacement,” a destructive and top-down process that contradicts many of the commitments outlined in official declarations and policy documents by the Turkish government. The state’s 12th Development Plan, for instance, commits the government to rebuilding earthquakeaffected cities in ways that are not only climatefriendly and disaster-resilient but also “taking into account their historical, social and cultural texture.” The plan explicitly states that “the return of indigenous people to their settlements will be ensured” and that “the historic and cultural fabric will be restored in a holistic manner,” while “connections between new urban settlements and old urban areas with historic fabric will be established and strongly sustained.

Conclusion

From Antakya, the government-promoted narrative of successful reconstruction and a rapid return to “normality” rings hollow. Ongoing recovery efforts fall far short of the commitments articulated in official policy documents. Three years after the disaster, developments on the ground diverge sharply from these pledges. Displacement has not only persisted through prolonged uncertainty and precarious living conditions. Residents are also being relocated within the city itself, fragmenting communities and producing new forms of exile at home. The built environment emerging from reconstruction bears little relation to the layered socio-cultural landscapes that historically structured life in Antakya and will foreclose the continuation of residents’ cultural practices and identity. In this sense, reconstruction has not simply failed to respond to displacement: it has become one of its principal drivers. The carefully staged images of recovery, including the symbolic handing over of housing keys against the backdrop of hastily completed facades, stand in stark contrast to the lived realities on the ground. A key to an apartment does not in itself constitute a home: without the conditions for meaningful emplacement, for many in Antakya, reconstruction is producing forms of exile at home.