A few kilometers from downtown Antakya, the largest city in Turkey's southern Hatay region, there is a makeshift roadside cemetery. Hundreds of identical mounds of earth are lined up in rows. The few gravestones invariably show the date of death as February 6, 2023. On that day, an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 plunged the country into mourning. In some places, the only identifier is a serial number painted on a simple wooden plank.
"Forensics did what they could, but there were so many bodies that not all could be identified," said Özlem Parlak. The 23-year-old communications student comes from the town of Malatya, a few hundred kilometers away. After the disaster, she could have chosen to rejoin her family, but for the past year she has stayed in Antakya. An activist with the far-left Workers' Party of Turkey (Türkiye İşçi Partisi, TIP), she works tirelessly with her political organization to coordinate aid for the population.
The panic, the smell of corpses: Her memories of the hours following the tremors are still vivid. Of the 50,000 victims of earthquakes in the country in 2023, almost half of them perished in Hatay, according to official figures, which are considered underestimated. This, despite the fact that the region is almost 200 kilometers from the epicenter. More than 6,000 buildings have collapsed, with 71% of the building stock damaged. Parlak admits that it is now impossible for her to return to certain districts of the city: "In Defne, in the Gazi, Armutlu, Elektrik districts, for example. You can't call it a district anymore. In fact, it's a completely empty plain."
Antakya is a thousand-year-old city, a multicultural melting pot, home to three religions. Today, the historic city center is unrecognizable. Many of the buildings that made up the region's architectural heritage have seen their walls crack or their roofs collapse. An essential visual landmark in Turkey, the silhouettes of minarets have now disappeared from the region. A handful of empty buildings stand in the middle of vast wastelands and the heady roar of construction machinery only ceases at dusk.
It has taken 12 months to clear away thousands of cubic meters of rubble, sand and metal. In the absence of feasible repairs, it's now the turn of uninhabitable buildings to be destroyed. The huge clouds of dust raised saturate the atmosphere and are worrying professional organizations, who are warning about the large quantities of asbestos present. Hired hastily by the roadside, the day laborers who take on this thankless job are often Syrian refugees.
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