It isn’t every day that the foreign ministers of Turkey and Greece are photographed in a bear hug, but that is what transpired on Sunday as Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Nikos Dendias ditched any semblance of frostiness upon the latter’s arrival in earthquake-shattered eastern Turkey. 

Although relations between Ankara and Athens have been increasingly antagonistic, last week’s cataclysm dialed them back, if only temporarily. It also underscores how the ultimate foe can sometimes be the ground underneath one’s feet — as well as Greece’s own vulnerability should it be hit by a devastating earthquake.

As the death toll from the 7.8-magnitude temblor that shook parts of Turkey and Syria on February 6 approached 34,000, Mr. Çavuşoğlu accompanied his Greek counterpart as they met with members of a Greek search-and-rescue mission that was operating in areas that suffered heavy damage. The visit included a stop at the rescue operations center at the hard-hit city of Antakya, which the Greeks refer to by its ancient name of Antioch. 

Since the quake struck a week ago, the war in Ukraine has largely receded from the Greek headlines. Instead, news reports have been dominated by heart-wrenching scenes of destruction around Turkey, sprinkled with articles about the impact of the disaster on President Erdogan’s political fortunes and upcoming elections in Turkey. More prevalent, though, is coverage of just how vulnerable Greece is should a similar disaster strike: For a country whose modern economy is largely dependent on tourism, the implications could not be more profound. 

When in March 2020 images of morgues overflowing with coronavirus victims emanated from Bergamo, Italy, Greece looked west to its Mediterranean neighbor with something close to panic. The weeks that followed saw Athens impose some of the toughest lockdown measures on the Continent in a bid to keep the pandemic under control. Now, Greece is looking at its fractious neighbor to the east with growing alarm as the realization sinks in that calamity could strike Greece at any moment. 

In a sense, it already has. Like Turkey, Greece is crisscrossed by faultlines, some very well known, others yet to be discovered, and all ultimately unpredictable, just as in antiquity. Iconic ruins that litter both sides of the Aegean coasts are reminders that while empires may crumble over time, it is the earth itself that has the unique power to turn glorious cities to poetic piles of rubble.

Speaking to the television station MEGA, a Greek professor who studies natural disasters, Konstantinos Synolakis, said that “the last major earthquake in Crete occurred in 1403 and it is estimated that such earthquakes occur every 600 to 800 years.” He added that Greece is already “at the window” of the century when “we may see a large earthquake in the Greek arc of magnitude 8.5 on the Richter scale.” 

Mr. Synolakis reminded viewers of an earlier, 8.2-magnitude quake that struck Crete in the year 365. That temblor was so powerful it raised portions of the island by 30 feet and sent a tsunami crashing into the Nile Delta, killing thousands. The giant wave reached as far as the coasts of Lebanon and Venice.

In 1953, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake shook the Ionian island of Kefalonia, killing up to 800 people. Also, in the past two decades alone, Greece has registered 20 earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 or more. According to seismologists, Greece releases 2 percent of the  world’s seismic energy and more than 50 percent of Europe’s seismic energy annually.

Building codes in Greece today are both more robust and more enforced than in many parts of Turkey, where shoddy construction and lax enforcement led to scenes of chao last week that were straight out of a 1970s disaster movie. The problem is older buildings, both in the capital, Athens, and around the country. 

In 2001 the Greek government ordered pre-seismic checks on 80,000 public buildings. By 2023, the Greek newspaper Ta Nea reported, only 25,000 of these had been checked. Then there is the matter of private residential and commercial property, some of which is older than the Hellenic Republic itself. 

According to a professor at the National Technical University of Athens quoted in that report, Panagiotis Karydis, the “shield of protection” against earthquakes is buildings that are built to code and that incorporate anti-seismic elements, and low-density population areas. 

Although not explicitly stated, the places most at risk of seismic destruction in Greece — apart from the geologically volatile islands like Crete and Santorini — are the central quarters of the country’s most densely populated cities, including Thessaloniki and Athens.