Istanbul shaken by 6.2 magnitude earthquake

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A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2 shook Istanbul on Wednesday, one of the largest to hit the city of 16mn people in recent years.

The quake, which struck at 12:49 local time, Turkey’s Afad disaster management agency said, was the second in a series of multiple tremors, and had its epicentre in the Sea of Marmara, about 40km south-west of the city centre, Afad said. There were no immediate reports of deaths or damage.

Hospitals were treating 151 people with injuries sustained when they jumped from their homes in panic, the governor’s office said.

Turkey is crossed by two major faultlines, earthquakes are frequent and Istanbul’s residents have long braced themselves for the “big one”. In 2023, two quakes in south-west Turkey with magnitudes of up to 7.8 killed more than 53,000 people and destroyed or damaged thousands of buildings.

“I felt the room shake and rushed out of my hotel immediately,” said one visiting Egyptian tourist in Istanbul’s upmarket Nişantaşı district, as she stood in a street thronged with panicked people bent over their smartphones.

Similar scenes were repeated across the city, including in a local television studio during a live interview with finance minister Mehmet Şimşek, who was speaking from the IMF/World Bank spring meetings in Washington. 

The quake lasted about five seconds and happened during a public holiday when schools were closed.

Although there were no immediate reports of collapsed buildings, the office of the Istanbul governor warned residents to keep a distance from structures that may have been damaged. 

In Fatih, a densely populated neighbourhood in central Istanbul where many Syrian refugees live, a Financial Times correspondent heard the wail of multiple sirens. 

Interior minister Ali Yerlikaya said in a post on X that the largest of the quakes was felt in Istanbul’s neighbouring provinces. Transport minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said airports, highways, train lines and subways were unaffected, according to initial assessments. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he was monitoring the situation closely.

Notably missing from among the Turkish authorities who said they were overseeing events was Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was arrested last month on corruption charges that he denies.

İmamoğlu, a star opposition politician whom polls show could beat Erdoğan in an election, had launched an “earthquake mobilisation plan” after the 2023 disaster, including replacing or retrofitting 165,000 housing units across the city. He has said that nearly 200,000 buildings are at risk. 

İmamoğlu is in custody awaiting trial in a prison located just north of the epicentre of Wednesday’s tremors.

Police were investigating reports of damage by helicopter but had seen no signs of major harm, the Istanbul police department said. 

Seismologist Naci Görür said on X that Wednesday’s tremors “increase the stress accumulated by” faultlines that run under the Sea of Marmara. “The real earthquake here will be bigger,” he said and warned that the city was not prepared for what awaited it.

The last major earthquakes to hit Istanbul directly were an estimated magnitude 7 quake in 1894, and a similar sized quake in 1766 — although a 1999 quake centred about 100km south-west of the city left about 1,000 people dead in Istanbul.