The photograph of a father holding the hand of his dead daughter, obtained by a photographer from the AFP agency, was
one of the harshest images that went around the world
after the devastating earthquake on February 6 in Turkey and Syria.
Almost three weeks after that catastrophe that caused more than 44,000 deaths in Turkey, Adem Altan,
the photojournalist
who captured that moment in a photographic sequence,
met again with Mesut Hancer
, the father who held his daughter's hand in the rain Irmak.
This father of four children
left the city of Kahramanmaras
, where he lived when the earthquake struck, a few days ago and moved to Ankara,
the capital of Turkey
, where he established his new home.
"I also lost my mother, my brothers and my nephews in the earthquake. But there is nothing comparable to burying a child
," explained this man in his 40s.
"It's an indescribable pain," he added, in an emotional conversation with the photographer who portrayed him in full pain.
Hancer lost much of his family in the quake.
Photo: Adem Altan/AFP.
His family is now trying to rebuild their lives away from devastated Kahramanmaras, a city near the
epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake
that also struck northern Syria.
The image of Hancer,
petrified with pain and indifferent to the cold and rain
and dressed in an orange anorak, symbolized the tragedy that tens of thousands of people lived through and provoked a wave of empathy.
A series of photos and solidarity in Turkey
A businessman from Ankara made a considerable gesture of
solidarity
: he offered the man and his family
a home
, and proposed that Hancer
hire him as an administrator
at his private television station.
In the living room of his new home, Hancer hung
a painting given to him by an artist
showing Irmak with angel wings next to him.
"I have not been able to leave her hand.
My daughter slept like an angel in her bed
," she explained the extent of her loss.
AFP photographer Adem Altan (left) with Mesut Hancer and the painting in which the man appears with his daughter.
Photo: Adem Altan/AFP
At the time the quake struck,
Hancer was working at his bakery
.
He immediately called his family and learned that his house had been damaged but not collapsed, and that his wife and three of his four children were safe and sound.
But the family hadn't heard from Irmak, the youngest of the brood, who had slept over
at her grandmother's apartment
that night to spend more time with her visiting cousins from Istanbul.
Hancer, very worried, quickly went to the grandmother's house and
there he found the building collapsed
and turned into a mountain of rubble.
And among the ruins he found the corpse of his daughter.
No rescue team appeared
in that area during the 24 hours after the catastrophe.
Hancer and other inhabitants had to manage to try to find relatives and acquaintances under the rubble.
Hancer now lives in Ankara with his wife Gulseren and their three children.
Two of them appear in the photo, Berkay and Ezgi.
Photo: Adem Altan/ AFP.
He
tried to remove the body of his dead daughter
by lifting concrete blocks with his hands.
It was an impossible task.
Desperate, frustrated and filled with a deep sadness,
he sat down
next to Irmak's corpse.
"I took her hand, stroked her hair and kissed her cheeks," she recalls.
A few minutes later, he saw Altan taking the first pictures of the aftermath of the earthquake.
"Take pictures of my daughter
, "
she murmured to
him in a voice broken by pain that was difficult to forget.
And the image of her eternalized the pain of so many for the loss of her loved ones.
DS
look also
Destroyed houses and lurking diseases: the hardships of the earthquake in Turkey
The pain of a father before his dead daughter: a photo that is symbolic of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria