The earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 was a cataclysm of unprecedented magnitude, the worst in 100 years.
The city of Antakya in the province of Hatay in southern Turkey and its inhabitants are among the hardest hit by the earthquake. Antakya was once an important economic center and the third largest city in the Roman Empire. But the devastating earthquakes destroyed almost everything in this historic city.
Kasim Gündüz is one of the people whose life changed completely that night. His family was torn apart by the natural disaster.
“My wife’s name is Shefika, I used to call her my rose”, said the man devastated by this tragedy. “I said, ‘Shefika! Shefika!,’ but I got no response. We had been married for 52 years,” Kasim explains.
Kasim told Euronews he is now awaiting what will likely be his wife’s remains. Her son’s body was pulled from the rubble and is in a plastic bag nearby. That night, Kasim’s world came crashing down along with everything else.
“I was able to help. I pulled out the body of my sister-in-law. She had lost her head”, says Mehmet Elmaci, another resident of Antakya. “My brother-in-law and their little girl are still in there”, he adds.
Deterioration of conditions
Antakya was founded in the year 300 BC and has had its share of disasters. It has been destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries. But when the area was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, everyone was caught off guard. Several days after the tragedy, help was still slow to arrive.
Mehmet is a survivor himself, but he doesn’t remember how he managed to get out of the rubble. He explains to Euronews that since the earthquake he had to sleep in his car with his wife and their 7-month-old son.
Without electricity, water and sanitation, those who survived the earthquake are still in danger. Infectious diseases like scabies and cholera spread rapidly and aftershocks occur every day.
In the first hours after the earthquake, the only hands available to sort through the rubble were those of survivors who were in shock, injured and had never done anything like this before.
Then came the first volunteers. Among them we find Erdem, a builder from Istanbul, who rushed to Antakya as soon as he heard about the earthquakes.
“I tried to do what needed to be done here. I managed to get a mother out. As I tried to reach her in her room, breaking her wardrobe, she started shouting: why are you break my things? Who are you? She yelled at me”, he explained.
“I managed to get a boy and his big sister out. I really wanted to get the most people out but I’m on my own now and there have been problems in the team. I don’t think I could do anything. single thing”, explains Erdem.
anger rises
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said nothing could have been done to prepare the country for such a tragedy. But in Antakya, not everyone agrees.
“The first day we arrived here, we wanted to drill, but we couldn’t even find a generator or a jackhammer. There was no AFAD or officials here,” explains Ibrahim Halil, a resident of Antakya.
“On the second day, machines came. But these people told me that they could not work now because they needed an order from above. And they waited for this order. The work is not organized and it is not done properly. Not a single well-trained person has come here”, he added.
But according to Cemal Güngör, it’s not because of the government. “Aid arriving late is not an act of negligence. But since these trucks and machines came from other provinces, it took time to bring them here. But now they are doing a great job,” he declares.
“The only reason the local municipalities did not work well was that their power had been reduced. No one could move even an inch without permission from above,” let know Halil who does not agree with Cemal Güngör.
Several days after the earthquake, the authorities still did not seem to have the situation under control, despite the influx of international aid.
The bodies are piling up
Antakya’s main cemetery provides insight into the scale of the disaster. With insufficient space to bury the dead, authorities opened a mass grave site on the outskirts of town.
DNA samples are taken from unidentified bodies so that families can one day bid their loved ones a proper farewell.
Meanwhile, the race to save the survivors continues well beyond what seemed like a reasonable time.
One of these survivors is Fatma, a 25-year-old Syrian refugee. After escaping the horrors of war in her country, she survived 140 hours under the rubble. It now has a new chance, just like this city, to be reborn.