In the recent earthquake in Turkey you see modern buildings crumble or pancake but a 500 year old mosque seems to be survived with only minor damage.
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Older buildings tends to be overengineered. They did not have the advantage of accurate calculations and simulators when designing the buildings so they tended to build on the safe side and make the buildings stronge then they needed. It does not take a great engineer to build a bulding that can stand for a century, but it does to build a building that will bearly stand for a century. With modern calulations and simulators we can more easily make buildings that cost a fraction of the price and which will stand for a long time. But of course this means that there are less room for error. Some contractors might even have saved money during construction by not including reinforcement that is only needed to handle earthquakes. By the time the earthquake hit the warantee on the contract have expired, the company is bankrupt or the people in charge have taken their bonuses and dividends and left.
There is also a fair bit of survivorship bias. This is an earthquake prone area, the last major earthquake was in 1998 and killed 145 people. The mosques that are standing today have been thrugh several such earthquakes. However the modern houses are built on ruins of houses that did not survive these earthquakes. So for a lot of these houses this is the first earthquake they have experienced, or at least the biggest.
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