The Four-Quadrant Framework applied to two heritage sites in post-earthquake Antakya.
This is the principal empirical application of the Four-Quadrant Framework. Two sacred sites, catastrophically damaged in the same event and located in the same urban field, are read comparatively through documented acts and across time.
Antakya’s continuity has been carried by proximity as much as by monuments. Narrow routes, short walking distances, and contiguous built surfaces produced a spatial condition in which confessional life, neighborhood circulation, and cross-community recognition were concentrated at street level.
February 2023 is the analytic condition. When the scaffold collapses—when thresholds are voided, routes interrupted, and courtyards sealed—the question is what continues to circulate without those supports. Continuity may persist as return, as insistence, as off-site coordination, as narrative attachment. It may also thin, fragment, or become newly dependent on official legibility.
The two sites are comparative anchors within the same damaged urban field, and they sit in markedly different custodial ecologies.
The selection is theory-testing rather than confirmatory. Both sites are of unambiguous heritage significance, both were catastrophically damaged in the same event, and both generated substantial documentation across the study window. Their different positions within the governance field make it possible to test whether the Framework’s findings hold across structurally different custodial ecologies, or are specific to a single institutional configuration.
A third anchor—the Antakya Synagogue on Kurtuluş Caddesi—was intended in the original research design, so that the city’s Abrahamic constellation would be represented through three proximate sites. Field access could not be secured during the observation periods.
Two fieldwork rounds function as observational anchor points within a broader study window. They are not the totality of the evidence: the window from February 2023 to early 2026 is covered through the wider documentary record, which allows change to be traced between and beyond the two visits.
Each act enters the analysis only through evidence appropriate to the study. Observation is reported separately from interpretation throughout.
The site should be read first as an urban connector—a point where the historic core’s proximity logic is most densely operative. Its heritage force begins at the level of location: the courtyard functions as a threshold interface where street and interior are negotiated through use, binding the mosque to the neighborhood that moves around it.
In August 2023 the compound was procedurally sealed, yet everyday presence persisted at its edge. A vendor operated immediately beside the fence; benches had been placed at the perimeter; a small self-organized gathering occupied the corner; the neighborhood muhtar moved through, greeting passers-by; a café in the adjacent street distributed complimentary coffee. This was a social rhythm that required no authorization and produced no institutional record, yet constituted the most visible form of community presence at the site boundary.
By June 2024 the boundary had expanded. The bus stop was absorbed into the fenced perimeter and the vendor’s corner was incorporated into the work zone. No explicit prohibition was required: the displacement followed from the ordinary spatial requirements of clearance, stabilization, and perimeter control, which narrowed the tolerances for lingering, vending, and informal gathering at the site edge.
The analytical point is not damage followed by repair. It is a relational transformation: unofficial everyday presence persists at the threshold of official enclosure, and is then absorbed as material restoration expands.
How to read the maps — Positions are qualitative, not metric. Counts show documented acts within the evidence corpus; they do not represent relative value or institutional weight.
The Material/Official field accumulates strongly—first through boundary-making and custody-marking acts, then through stabilization, clearance, and classification. The Immaterial/Unofficial field remains the densest of the four. The Material/Unofficial field holds four acts and is brief and fragile.
What the map shows is not a restoration record. It is multiple forms of continuity operating at the same site under different modes of authorization.
Read serially, the two official fields do not run in parallel. They follow structurally different temporal logics.
Material/Official acts accumulate continuously from closure onward, while Immaterial/Official acts remain absent for thirty-four months before condensing at reopening.
Material/Official acts begin within days of the earthquake—barriers, custody markers, access restrictions—and thicken progressively through stabilization, clearance, classification, and reconstruction. The Immaterial/Official field registers nothing across that same period: no congregational programming, no mourning acknowledgment, no ritual continuity, no kandil observance. It then activates at high density within an eight-week window at completion.
At the method’s detection threshold, this absence is not explained by a sparse documentary record. The restoration generated a substantial public record throughout, yet no recoverable Immaterial/Official act at the scale of institutional programming appeared across the sources surveyed.
The Immaterial/Unofficial field behaves differently again. It does not disappear as the perimeter expands—it migrates, from acts of physical proximity at the threshold to digitally mediated and distributed memory practice.
The church sits within the same damaged urban field but follows a different institutional pathway. Continuity here surfaces primarily at thresholds—through return, visual reference, perimeter viewing, and informal acts of care—rather than through interior technical action.
In August 2023 the courtyard surface appeared intentionally cleared and legible as a distinct open zone against the surrounding rubble field. Two benches, a plastic chair, and a fabric canopy were arranged in relation to a white metal cross standing upright at its center—a salvaged element, deliberately placed rather than deposited by collapse. The site had no visible custodial infrastructure, yet the arrangement indicates that the courtyard was functioning as a locus of gathering, orientation, and post-disaster recognition under ruin conditions.
By June 2024 the plot was enclosed by a temporary tarpaulin fence printed with Ministry of Culture and Tourism markings, though one segment stood open and no supervision was present. Inside, the condition remained close to the 2023 collapse state: no systematic debris removal, stabilization, or reconstruction workflow. The courtyard was empty of the gathering arrangement, a container box occupying the cleared area. The clearest on-site evidence of institutional action was an A4 notice at eye level bearing a QR code and a survey-point instruction.
This is not the same story at a slower pace. An unofficial, spiritual, and social field remains legible; what does not arrive is an equivalent sustained worksite regime.
Official action on the physical fabric was visible early—pre-disaster technical drawings that survived the collapse, perimeter fencing and Ministry identifiers, a survey-point notice, and a formalized international partnership—but it had not yet become sustained work on the site. Custody was announced and partly marked out through boundaries and documentation, without turning the ruin into an active worksite. In the Framework, the Material/Official field is therefore present but operationally thin.
The Immaterial/Unofficial field is dense and historically prior. The Immaterial/Official field is active episodically across the window rather than deferred as a single block—it opens ten weeks after the earthquake with an Easter service held at the ruins.
This is a distinction between institutional presence and operational material custody. It is not a description of institutional absence.
Same rupture. Same urban field. Different custodial ecologies—and different distributions across the accumulation fields.
The two sites share the order of events on the official side: at both, official action on the physical fabric comes first and dominates the restoration period. Where they differ is whether that early action becomes sustained work on the ground within the study window. In the Framework this is the Material/Official field—early and dominant at both sites, but operationally thick at one and thin at the other.
At both sites, institutional support for the practices through which each site is socially lived—services, commemorations, congregational programming—arrived later than institutional action on the buildings themselves, and clustered around specific threshold moments rather than running continuously. In the Framework this is the Immaterial/Official field, and its timing differs sharply between the two. At Habib-i Neccar the field stays empty for thirty-four months, then appears all at once as a dense institutional spike at reopening. At St. Paul it activates early and recurs in episodes across the full window.
Beneath both, the Immaterial/Unofficial substrate is continuous. At both sites, this field is already active before the first official act in the study window and remains active through the window’s end.
Across both sites, the comparison revealed a structured dependency between official heritage action and forms of community-carried continuity that precede it, persist through it, and are not produced by it.
Each site tests a different side of that dependency. Habib-i Neccar shows strong, early official work on the building alongside official recognition of community practice that arrives late—strong Material/Official action with delayed Immaterial/Official recognition. St. Paul shows official action that is announced but not yet sustained on site, alongside a dense field of community-carried continuity—an operationally thin Material/Official field alongside a dense Immaterial/Unofficial one.
Neither site could make the finding visible on its own. Read together, they show that the dependency is not symmetrical: the less institutionally visible of the two fields is the more durable one. It precedes official governance, persists through it, and is not acknowledged by it.
At Habib-i Neccar, where reopening is empirically observed within the study window, the official act of reinstatement draws directly upon that substrate. A ceremony can be staged whether or not a community is present to receive it. What the substrate provides is the social reality that makes the ceremony mean what it claims to mean—homecoming rather than inauguration, return rather than construction.
One question remains untestable within this study window: if and when the Material/Official field at St. Paul reaches operational completion, whether the same compressed pattern appears. The window closes before this can be observed.
A damage assessment would have registered two ruined buildings recovering at different speeds. Mapping documented acts across both continua, and re-reading them across time, makes a different set of things legible:
The thirty-four month absence at Habib-i Neccar is not visible in any material record of the restoration. The density of the substrate at St. Paul is not visible in its project pathway. Both become visible when the fields are mapped across the same window.
This case study draws on doctoral research.
A Four-Quadrant Framework for Cultural Preservation: Mapping Relational Dynamics in Heritage Practice
Çiçek Karataş Yıldırım
Fieldwork was conducted in two rounds, in August 2023 and June 2024. The study window extends from February 2023 to early 2026 through the broader documentary record; it does not indicate continuous presence on site. Figures on this page are website visualizations developed from the dissertation’s quadrant mappings. Photographic credits and full source citations are drawn from the dissertation record.
The same analytical process can be scoped to a current site, programme, recovery process, or institutional question: defining the evidence field, mapping documented acts, identifying gaps and dependencies, and translating the diagnosis into a project-specific analytical output.
The Four-Quadrant Framework is a diagnostic visual-analytic method for positioning documented acts across tangibility and authority, and reading how their distribution changes over time.