Qualla: 1766 Marmara Earthquake

1766 Marmara Earthquake: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Website Demis.nl, Public domain. The people of Tekirdag had already been through one earthquake that year. On 22 May 1766, a magnitude-7 shock had struck the Sea of Marmara, killing thousands and damaging buildings across an arc that ran from Istanbul to Gelibolu. By early August, salvage was underway: roofs were being re-tiled, walls were being shored up, the rhythm of summer in the wheat fields and vineyards was reasserting itself. Then, on 5 August, the fault moved again - this time the western segment, the Ganos Fault, where the North Anatolian Fault dives under the sea on its way out toward the Aegean. The second earthquake of 1766 was larger than the first. More than five thousand people died.

Read more: 1766 Marmara Earthquake on Qualla

Image: Website Demis.nl | Public domain

1766 Marmara Earthquake: The Fault That Will Not Rest

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Sea of Marmara sits at one of the most geologically restless places in Europe. The Anatolian plate is being shoved westward, squeezed out from under the colliding Arabian plate to its southeast, and the North Anatolian Fault is the slip-line where that westward escape happens...

Read more: 1766 Marmara Earthquake on Qualla

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

1766 Marmara Earthquake: Hoşköy at the Center

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. The greatest violence was at Hoşköy, on the northern shore of the sea, where the shaking reached level X on the Modified Mercalli scale - 'extreme,' the category at which masonry simply ceases to exist as masonry. Whole villages were unbuilt. At Gülcük, Gelibolu, Gaziköy, Mürefte...

Read more: 1766 Marmara Earthquake on Qualla

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

1766 Marmara Earthquake: Another Year, Another Quake

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 29 May 1776, ten years to within a week of the first shock of 1766, a third earthquake struck the same region. This one was smaller. Damage was widespread but minor. By then most of the buildings that had been going to fall had already fallen and been rebuilt; what was new cou...

Read more: 1766 Marmara Earthquake on Qualla

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0

1766 Marmara Earthquake: The Pattern Continues

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mikenorton, CC BY-SA 3.0. Look at the dates and a rhythm emerges. 1509. 1766. 1894. 1912 on the Ganos Fault again. 1999 at İzmit and Düzce. April 2025, off Marmara Ereğlisi. Each event is its own catastrophe, but together they trace the slow, methodical work of a fault that has been doing this since the l...

Read more: 1766 Marmara Earthquake on Qualla

Image: Mikenorton | CC BY-SA 3.0