The World Without Us

In a 21st century where more than half the human race lives in cities and where most people are poor, cheap variations on the theme of reinforced concrete are repeated daily: planet-wide piles of low bids that will come crashing down in a posthuman world, and do so even faster if the city is near a fault line. When an earthquake strikes Istanbul, its narrow, winding streets will clog so totally with the rubble of thousands of wrecked buildings, Sözen estimates, that much of the city will simply have to close down for 30 years before the massive destruction can be cleared away.

Assuming there is anybody to do the clearing. If not, and if Istanbul remains a city where snow regularly falls in the winter, then freeze-thaw cycles will have plenty of earthquake detritus to reduce to sand and soil above the cobbles and pavement. Every earthquake causes fires; in the absence of response crews, the grand old wooden Ottoman mansions along the Bosphorus will contribute the ash of long-extinct cedars to the formation of new soil.

Although mosque domes, like the Hagia Sophia’s, will initially survive, the shaking will have loosened their masonry, and freeze-thaw will work at their mortar until bricks and stones start to fall. Eventually, as in 4,000-year-old Troy 175 miles down Turkey’s Aegean coast, only Istanbul’s roofless temple walls will remain—still standing, but buried.

2. Terra Firma

Should Istanbul exist long enough to complete its planned subway system—including a line under the Bosphorus that would link Europe and Asia—since its tracks will cross no fault line, it will probably remain intact, albeit forgotten, long after the city on the surface is gone. (Subways whose tunnels do encounter geologic faults, however, such as the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART and New York City’s MTA, may face another fate.) In the Turkish capital of Ankara, the subway system’s central nerve core broadens into an extensive underground shopping district with mosaic walls, acoustic ceilings, electronic billboard screens, and arcades of stores—an orderly underworld compared to the cacophony of the streets above.

Ankara’s sub-surface shops; Moscow’s subway, with its deep train tunnels and chandelier-lit, museum-like underground stations, renowned as some of the most elegant spots in the city; Montreal’s subterranean village of shops, malls, offices, apartments, and labyrinthine passages that reflect the city in miniature and link its old-fashioned surface structures—all these underground creations stand the best chance of any man-made edifices of lasting into whatever hereafter lies beyond human existence on Earth. Although seepage and surface cave-ins will eventually reach them, buildings still exposed to the elements will go well before structures that were born already buried.

These won’t be the oldest, however. Three hours south of Ankara is a region of central Turkey whose name, Cappadocia, ostensibly means “Land of Fine Horses.” But that has to be a mistake: the result, possibly, of some garbled pronunciation of a more fitting description in some ancient tongue, because not even winged horses could steal the spotlight from this landscape—or from what lies beneath it.

In 1963, a fresco now thought to be the oldest landscape painting on Earth was discovered in Turkey by University of London archaeologist James Mellaart. Between 8,000 and 9,000 years old, it is also the oldest known work rendered on a surface constructed by humans: in this case, a mud-brick plastered wall. Overtly two-dimensional, the eight-foot mural is a flattened image of an erupting, double-coned volcano. Out of context, its components make little sense: The volcano itself, painted with ochre pigments worked into wet lime plaster, could be mistaken for a bladder, or even two disembodied breasts—in this case, the teats of a female leopard, as they are curiously flecked with black spots. The volcano also seems to be perched directly atop a pile of boxes.

From the vantage point of where it was discovered, however, its meaning is unmistakable. The double-barreled volcano’s shape matches the silhouette of 10,700-foot Hasan Dağ 40 miles to the east, a long swoop of a mountain that hangs over central Turkey’s high Konya plain. Together, the boxes form a primitive town plat of what many scholars consider the world’s first city, Çatal Höyük, which is twice as old as the pyramids of Egypt—and, with a population around 10,000, was far bigger than its contemporary, Jericho.