It is almost a year since, in the early hours of February 6, 2023, two powerful earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 and 7.8 shook Turkey and Syria, killing more than 60,000 people.
After the earthquake, the Executive of Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who was facing crucial elections - promised rapid reconstruction, but 12 months later only about 15% of the promised homes have been completed.
Nearly 700,000 people continue to live in government-run container camps, and several tens of thousands more in informal settlements.
The affected area in the southeast of Turkey, larger than Portugal and where 14 million people lived before the earthquake, is trying to get back on its feet with difficulty - hundreds of thousands of families depend on aid from the State and international organizations to survive―, while in the most affected provinces the demolition of the damaged buildings has not been completed and the clearing work continues.
There are days when Mr. Semih does not know how to return home.
The building of this retired master builder is one of the few left standing in the Armutlu neighborhood, in the city of Antioquia, the one that came out worst from the earthquake.
He has a hard time finding his way back because he doesn't recognize the city.
How to recognize something that no longer exists?
There are no reference points left.
It's like moving around Dogville, Lars von Trier's imaginary city, but without signs indicating what's on each plot.
Only the ruins allow us to know that there was a store, a neighbor's building, a mosque or a church.
The rest are lots covered in rubble, bordered by muddy roads full of potholes, dotted with a few buildings that remain standing, many of them visibly damaged, but whose owners have appealed the demolition orders.
“I worked abroad, in Saudi Arabia, I worked hard, because then there was hope that things would be better tomorrow,” says Semih: “Not anymore.
The only thing we can hope for is for the day to end and the next to arrive.”
View of Mimar Sinan, one of the neighborhoods in the center of Antioch (Turkey) in August 2022 and last October Planet Labs PBC
Very little by little, the covered bazaar of Antioch begins to come back to life, as merchants open the shops that were not destroyed or that they have managed to repair, but as night falls, the center of the city is almost deserted.
In abandoned buildings, the wind blows curtains outward through broken glass, as if inhabited by ghosts.
“In this city there was commerce, there was wealth.
Now there are no houses, there are no jobs, there are no people,” laments Aziza, who is around 40 years old and sells vegetables in a makeshift stall at the exit of the market.
She has dedicated her entire life to that, to working to raise her five children on her own.
Let them study.
As her eldest daughter, who graduated in Engineering, a real pride.
“We were a happy family, we all lived together in the same building, we were united,” she says.
The earth shook and the buildings took away what he loved most.
Three children - among them, the eldest -, relatives, neighbors, friends.
Aziza tells terrible stories of the days that followed the earthquake, of the search for the body of one of her daughters, of screams that died away under the collapsed buildings, of destroyed bodies, of a boy from the neighborhood who appeared with a plastic bag black with his sister's head, everything he had been able to recover from her.
“How much we have suffered!
Only those who have lived it know it.”
New cemetery of Antioch (Hatay province) where the remains of the victims of the earthquake of February 6, 2023 rest. The graves without a headstone indicate the presence of bodies that have not yet been identified.
Andres Mourenza
Mrs. Aziza, her two children and a relative in the small construction container inside the camp for victims where she lives, in the city of Antioch (southern Turkey).
Aziza, who works selling vegetables at the market, lost three children, two grandchildren and her daughter-in-law in the earthquake.
Andres Mourenza
Antioch (Hatay province) One year after the earthquake that left more than 53,000 dead and 3 million homeless in the south and southeast of Turkey, the work to demolish damaged buildings and clear debris has not yet been completed. Andrés Mourenza
Mehmet Davut, in his one-room house, which was built on the site of his own, destroyed by the earthquake in the village of Sekeroba (Kahramanmaras province).
He suffers from acute respiratory failure, which is why he could not survive in the small containers in which the Government houses the victims of the earthquake, so he decided to build this humble house while waiting to be granted one of the new public housing units.
Andres Mourenza
Antioch (Hatay province) One year after the earthquake that left more than 53,000 dead and 3 million homeless in the south and southeast of Turkey, work to demolish damaged buildings and clear debris has not yet been completed.
Andres Mourenza
Islahiye (Gaziantep province).
Workers finish the new housing blocks of the public company TOKI before they are inaugurated by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Construction of about seven hundred houses in the village of Sekeroba (Kahramanmaraş province) for those affected in the area.
Despite the government's promise of rapid reconstruction, during the first year barely 15% of the promised homes have been built. Andrés Mourenza
There are some families who have not even been able to find their loved ones.
According to deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioglu, there are 148 missing persons, whose bodies have not been found and it is not known whether they are alive or dead.
Strange cases such as that of Fikriye Aybüke Körük, 26, who was rescued injured and transferred to a hospital in Izmir (western Turkey), "of which there are records and even images", but whose trace is lost there, despite the efforts of her mother and those close to her, who have been searching for her for a year.
Gergerlioglu and other opposition deputies have presented a motion in Parliament to investigate these cases, especially those of almost 40 missing children.
“But the government parties have voted against it,” he denounces.
Waiting in the containers
When she picks up her post, Aziza returns to her new home: a 20 square meter container house (two bedrooms and a tiny living room-kitchen) where she, her two children and a friend of the minor who lost his family live.
On both sides of the container house, similar ones extend in a row.
And one row is followed by another, until there are 80 containers, which form what is called a
container-city
.
The outskirts of Antioch and other affected cities are populated by these
container cities,
financed by municipalities from other parts of the country and directed by the Turkish emergency management agency (AFAD).
It is a better solution than the tents that 2.5 million people lived in until last summer, but life in them is not easy.
“They are very small, like a cell.
When it rains a lot, water enters, and the streets between the containers flood and it is difficult to move.
We live in very harsh conditions,” complains Gökhan, a resident of another container house.
689,101 people live
in
container cities .
Officially, the tent camps have been dismantled and their residents housed in containers, but informal settlements can still be seen in various parts of the affected area.
There are also many who live in tents or containers installed next to their former homes, because they fear their property will be stolen, or because they oppose its demolition.
“Even though the houses are damaged, many families are all they have and they don't know if they can afford to build a new one if it is demolished,” explains engineer Inal Büyükasik.
The Turkish State gives monthly aid of between 3,000 and 5,000 liras per family (90-150 euros);
However, in many cases it is insufficient to cover a new rental, given the increase in prices.
Hundreds of thousands have emigrated to other areas of the country or even abroad.
The Government estimates that it is necessary to build 680,000 homes and 170,000 commercial premises.
Before the May elections, in which he revalidated his mandate after 20 years in power, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had promised to build 319,000 homes before the first anniversary of the earthquake, but only 46,000 have been completed.
The increase in the costs of materials and labor has caused fewer construction companies to be interested in the projects tendered by TOKI, the public housing agency, which, added to the delay in demolition and debris removal work, is delaying the plans.
According to the World Bank, rebuilding the area will cost more than 90 billion euros, around 10% of Turkey's annual GDP.
“I give my word that the only help I have received [from the State] is this tent, and even then I got it with difficulty,” explains Mehmet, a barber from the coastal town of Samandag, south of Antioch, who practices his profession under plastic: “Yes, we were promised many things, but they have not come true, and no one believes that they will be fulfilled.”
In Hatay, the province to which these towns belong, many complain that the State has “abandoned” them, and many believe that this is because it is an area where the center-left opposition usually wins.
That is why there are those who, facing the municipal elections next March, are considering voting for Erdogan's party, to see if the central government stops discriminating against them.
Following the Eastern Anatolian Fault in a northerly direction, the construction of new housing becomes more evident when changing provinces.
In the towns of Islahiye and Nurdagi (Gaziantep province), 45 blocks totaling more than a thousand apartments have already been completed, and the Turkish flag and Erdogan's portrait hang from several of them for their inauguration.
They stand out because they break with the aesthetics and tradition of low houses in the area, but they seem robust.
“Soil studies have been done and it has been reinforced.
The buildings have been built with anti-seismic measures.
In fact, none of TOKI's buildings collapsed in the earthquake,” says a construction manager.
Mehmet Davut, in front of the buildings built by the public company TOKI in the town of Sekeroba (Kahramanmaras province) for those affected by the earthquake.
Andres Mourenza
A little further north, in Sekeroba (Kahramanmaras province), workers are busy finishing another 700 homes, whose draw will be held on the 6th. Mehmet Davut, 48, hopes to be one of the lucky ones.
He lives with his wife in a modest one-room cement house that he built on his own on the lot that left his house in ruins: "I tried to live in a container, but it was so small that I lacked oxygen," he says, well suffers from a respiratory illness.
In the town, activity is gradually returning to normal, he explains, but he is anxiously awaiting the result of the draw, so he can live in more acceptable conditions.
What worries him most is whether he and his new neighbors will be able to get used to life in an apartment block, accustomed as they are to their single-family town houses, and whether he will be able to pay the 25,000 euros that TOKI will charge them (the other half of the price will be paid by the State) with its meager disability pension (90 euros).
Back in Antioch, Aziza, the greengrocer, knows that she will not be entitled to any public housing, because before the earthquake she was renting.
All she has to do is keep linking day after day, work and work.
“We are all heartbroken, but we are forced to continue living.
I have to continue working, for my two children.
But I don't think about the future anymore."
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