ADIYAMAN, Turkey - After his sister and niece were trapped in the ruins of their apartment building during the earthquake that rocked southern Turkey last week, Cigdem Ulgen rushed to the scene to try to save them.
She had no way of digging through the tangle of metal and concrete that remained of the building in the hard-hit city of Adiyaman, so she settled on the street with her mother and siblings for a wait that grew more agonizing as The hours passed, and then the days.
As rescue teams dug through the rubble, the family rummaged through chairs and a sofa.
Volunteers handed out metal fires, bottles of water, lentil soup, hand cream, cigarettes and oranges.
More than a week later, they were still there, waiting for news
that had not yet arrived.
More than a week after the quake, hope of finding survivors was fading.
(Emin Ozmen/The New York Times)
"We are always here. We sit. We try to sleep. We eat what people bring us, not the government," said Ulgen, 38.
"We won't leave until they leave."
Nine days after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake and powerful aftershock struck the area on February 6,
death has become part of daily life
throughout the quake zone, with more than 40,000 deaths in Turkey and Syria, and the number of victims is expected to increase.
During this time, the Turkish media have consistently reported on audacious and improbable rescues, such as that of an 18-year-old boy who was pulled alive from the ruins of Adiyaman on Tuesday, 198 hours after the quake.
But with
such rescues becoming rarer
, families are hunkering down near the rubble, throughout the disaster zone, to wait for their loved ones to be found.
Impromptu vigils are simple and painful gatherings.
Families sit on curbs, crouch on rooftops and climb on nearby rubble to watch bulldozers scrape through the concrete.
They fuel bonfires with wood salvaged from smashed cupboards and blinds to ward off the winter chill, and brew tea over the flames.
While they wait, rescue teams question them to find out how many people were in a building when it collapsed like a Jenga tower, or which way to get through the roof to get to a missing woman's bedroom.
A rescue worker at a collapsed building in Adiyaman, Turkey.
(Emin Ozmen/The New York Times)
When bodies are exhumed, often disfigured or decomposing, they lie in wait while body bags are briefly opened to identify next of kin - by face, missing teeth, toenail fungus or earrings- and be able to bury them.
Many of the families are furious with the government and say they
did not see the rescue teams until two or three days after the quake
, when the chance of saving the survivors was dwindling fast.
Confusion continued, they say, as rescue teams, both Turkish and international, came and went, some without equipment to do the job, others leaving before finishing it.
While they waited, their hopes were dashed.
"First we came here thinking we could save them," said Ibrahim Savas, Ulgen's brother.
"Then we thought maybe we could save them, but wounded.
Now we just hope to get their bodies back
."
He and two of his sisters, who also lived elsewhere in Turkey, fled to Adiyaman after the earthquake and had been surprised to find no one to search his sister's building.
They soon found out that a rescue team had already worked in the building next door, and they left.
The day after the earthquake, workers had recovered the bodies of Yakup Tas, an MP for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, and members of his family, state media reported.
But when Ulgen arrived at the scene that afternoon, rescuers were nowhere to be found.
"They came with everything they had for the legislator," Ulgen said.
"And then they left."
A week later, the family was still waiting when rescue teams dumped three black bags containing four bodies on the street.
A family that had camped next to them came forward, hands over their noses and mouths, to peer at the corpses, lamenting what they saw.
Half an hour later, the other family was gone, the fire that had kept them warm had turned to ash, their vigil over.
Ulgen and his relatives continued to wait.
Elsewhere, relatives of the missing sat on bricks, boards and blankets as rescue teams dug at three points for 12 bodies believed to remain in the ruins.
"
Usually we stay until 4 in the morning
, then we go to nearby tents or cars to sleep for two hours and come back," said a soldier who was waiting for the remains of three relatives and who gave only his first name, Yasin, following the army protocol.
"We don't eat much."
Workers pulled a body bag from the rubble.
A group of people cry after rescue teams found the body in a collapsed building in Adiyaman, Turkey.
(Emin Ozmen/The New York Times)
"Leyla," a relative said, identifying the woman it contained, and sobs erupted from the crowd.
Shortly after, a second corpse arrived.
Around Adiyaman, residents salvaged possessions from what was left of their homes: blankets, photo albums, rugs, a pair of jeans worn by a dead brother with a car key and a folding knife still in the pocket.
Near a public clock that had been frozen in time at 4:17 a.m., at the time of the quake, men rummaging through a hole in the rubble brought up dusty but intact liquor bottles.
According to Mustafa Gokhan Demir, his family's liquor store had been on the ground floor of the building.
They planned to clean the bottles in hopes of selling them elsewhere.
"It's all we have left
," he said.
At dusk, dozens of workers from Turkish and international teams were working in another sprawling area, where several buildings had collapsed on each other, leaving mountains of rubble.
A group of Turkish miners inspected the wooden supports of a hole to prevent cave-ins;
a Bangladeshi man dressed in red and gray camouflage hammered on a tiled floor.
Groups from China and Sudan lounged by bonfires, and two rescuers from Virginia watched.
Petr Slachta, a member of a Czech team, said they had deployed sniffer dogs, thermal cameras, twenty-foot-long "snake" cameras and sensitive equipment to detect voices deep in the rubble.
Within a week they had found about 50 people.
Only three were alive.
He didn't expect there would be many more.
Sitting by the fire on an oil drum near the rubble, Mehmet Tas, a construction engineer, said he had fled to Adiyaman, his hometown, from Istanbul just after the earthquake.
Since then he has been camping with his relatives, waiting for his sister, her husband and his mother, as well as the couple's three grandchildren, ages 4, 5 and 6.
More than a week after the quake, only the children were still missing.
As the men stoked the fire to prepare for the night and the Czech team erected a glowing sphere on a pole to illuminate the rubble, Tas said he hoped some families would stay in town to help rebuild and wondered when they would reopen. the schools.
The people who left felt like a "fish out of water" elsewhere, he said, adding that he hoped one day the men would meet again in the evenings in the city's coffee shops to exchange the news of the day.
But for now, all he could do was wait.
"I have three people in there," he says, pointing to the rubble.
"They haven't come out yet."
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