TURKEY: Several thousand people in the northern Turkish district of Niksar were preparing for another night camped out in streets and gardens yesterday, as rumours that last Wednesday's total solar eclipse would cause a major earthquake showed no signs of fading.
"We plan to stay another two months," elderly villager Mustafa Hasta told Turkish reporters in the tent he was sharing with six family members. He pointed to his eight-month-old grandson tied tightly to his cradle.
"We have taken all possible precautions."
Alarmist news reports linking the eclipse to seismic activity began last autumn and had reached such a pitch in the run-up to March 29th that top Turkish earthquake experts staged two days of press conferences calling for calm.
Their efforts came to nothing in Niksar, though, where panic began with a letter sent by a university lecturer to local authorities last February.
An engineer with no experience in seismology, Mustafa Yildirim, warned that the eclipse would trigger an earthquake in Niksar measuring up to 7.2 on the Richter scale sometime between April 3rd and 10th.
Turkish experts rebutted his claim that the combined gravitational pull of moon and sun would stir up the earth's crust. Statistical evidence linking eclipses to earth tremors is circumstantial at best, they said.
But many Turks remember that a solar eclipse preceded the earthquake that devastated Istanbul's southernmost suburbs, killing at least 20,000 people in 1999.
The people of Niksar have their own reasons to fear the ground they walk on. Built on the same highly active faultline as Istanbul, their town was all but razed by earthquakes in 1939 and 1942.
Fearing a repeat, some local civil servants applied months back to take their annual leave in early April, according to daily Zaman. Turkish media reported that 80 per cent of houses in villages built over the faultline were already empty. That percentage is likely to increase.
"I don't personally believe the earthquake stories," one villager told CNN-Turk yesterday, carrying mattresses out to a tent in his garden. "But all our neighbours are already out, and my kids refused to spend another minute in the house."
He looked understandably downcast. But if the atmosphere of panic has made anybody smile, it's the tent-sellers. With stocks right down, basic tents are now selling for 400 lira (around €250), a small fortune in provincial Turkey.