The seismicity of the Marmara Sea area 1800-1899

The paper presents an extended summary of the most important earthquakes of the 19th century in the Marmara Sea region in north-west Turkey. We can find no evidence for a significant earthquake occuring during the first half of the 19th century, a period during which the west terminal, of the North Anatolian fault system was much more active further west. This variation of activity with time of segments of fault zones, such as the Anatolian, is typical; the smaller the segment considered the longer the sampling period needed for moment rates and hazard estimates to be reliable. We find that the larger and some of the smaller events of the 19th century are clearly associated with known active faults which have generated earlier and later damaging earthquakes.