GNGTS 2024 - Atti del 42° Convegno Nazionale

Session 1.1 GNGTS 2024 the third – Malatya – is more than 300 km away (Fig. 2). What happened in between? Could someone - either Maestro Andrea who wrote by hearsay (“se dice”) or Sanudo who copied him - have made a mistake in trascribing one of these names? Could some other place-name have been wrongly transcribed as “Malatya”? Fig. 2 – Macroseismic data points assessed for the earthquake of the year 1513/1514. Sanudo copied the informaton on the earthquake, saving it for future use. It surfaced, with literary fourishes, in a Venetan chronicle of the years 1512-1514 (Barbaro, 16 th c.), and afer this chronicle was published (1842) in a 19 th century geological treatse (Abich, 1882) that in its turn was one of the sources for Calvi (1941). Seismological studies and catalogues then followed in Calvi’s wake, locatng the earthquake either generically in “Cilicia” (the region to which Tarsus and Adana belong), or in Malatya, with Io 6 (Ergunay et al., 1967) or 7 (Soysal et al., 1981). Them came Ambraseys (1989), that went back to the somewhat romanced narraton provided by Barbaro (16 th c.), calculatng Mw 7.4 and locatng the epicentre not far from Maras, on the Pazarcik segment of the Eastern Anatolian Fault with I=IX (maximum intensity observed… but where?). Subsequent seismological literature on the Eastern Anatolian Fault, both before and since the 2023 earthquake took and stll takes the interpretaton of the 1513 or 1514 earthquake provided by Ambraseys (1989) as absolute truth: the 1514 earthquake must have been located near Maras, with a M 7 at least and be a most likely predecessor of the February 2023 earthquake. Yet Ambraseys had changed his mind on this account, concluding that “without further details this informaton is insufcient to indicate the precise date and area over which this earthquake was felt” (Ambraseys, 2009). And, looking back to the original source of informaton on it, one must surely agree with him.