Turkey’s Sunken City Captured on Video Again After 27 Years

Twenty-seven years after the devastating earthquake in Turkey, divers once again descended into the waters off Değirmendere in the Gölcük district and filmed what remains of the former city. Fragments of buildings, streetlights, tea garden fixtures and other objects that once stood on the shore still lie beneath the waters of the Marmara Sea.

On 17 August 1999, an earthquake measuring around 7.4 in magnitude became one of the biggest disasters in Turkey’s modern history. The Gölcük district was hit particularly hard. In Değirmendere, part of the coastal area literally subsided into the sea, sending the buildings located there underwater. Studies of the earthquake’s impact show that, as a result of the coastal zone subsiding, the sea advanced hundreds of metres inland in some places.

Today, the sunken area is known as an “underwater city”. According to Turkish media, it lies approximately 180 metres from the current shoreline, while the remains of the structures are located at depths ranging from 18 to 55 metres. They include uprooted plane trees, streetlights, tea garden umbrellas and commercial structures.

This time, divers from the fire department of the Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality travelled to the site. They once again recorded the structures and objects that have survived underwater since the disaster. At the same time, the site has changed considerably over the decades: the sunken structures have become part of the underwater ecosystem, and marine organisms have settled around them.

What is particularly striking is that traces of the ordinary lives people led here before the earthquake can still be seen underwater. The tea garden, trees, building elements and other objects have become a kind of time capsule — they now serve as a reminder of how dramatically an entire city can change in just a few seconds.

Twenty-seven years later, Değirmendere’s “underwater city” remains one of the clearest reminders of the power of the 1999 earthquake: the disaster changed not only buildings and people’s lives, but also the very shoreline of the Marmara Sea.