‘Have we no dignity left?’: the Turkish town forced to dig itself out from the rubble

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For 60 hours, Bar?? Yapar tried to dig his grandparents’ bodies out from under the rubble of their own home. With his parents, Habip and Sevcan, the 27-year-old clinical psychology student tried in vain to extract the corpses. It was desperate work. It took two full days following Monday’s devastating twin earthquake before Turkey‘s official disaster relief agency reached the town of Samanda? near the Syrian border; when they finally arrived, the small number of rescuers were stretched thin.

The Yapars watched as rescue workers pulled people from the smashed concrete the family had known for generations. There was Semire Zubari who owned the local market they had shopped at for years; there was the body of G?n?l Sakall? who Bar?? had known since he was a child.

Then he saw the body of Semire’s son Hasan, his childhood friend. “There were no cars left to carry him to the morgue,” Bar?? said. “I mean, so many people were already transporting corpses with their cars. So the only vehicle left was a digger. I watched as they put my childhood friend in the front of the digger to carry him to the morgue. Seeing that, seeing these extremes, it shattered me. I wondered, do we not even have the dignity left to carry our corpses properly to the morgue?”

Eventually, rescue workers from the Istanbul municipality came to the Yapars’ aid – but even then, they were lacking resources. “They looked at it and said: ‘We don’t have the tools to get them out,'” said Bar??. “My dad is a civil engineer, and he basically told them: ‘Look, I do have the tools; just get it done. Just take them out because we can’t risk it ourselves.’ I mean, he’s an engineer – he’s not a rescue worker. So they brought a generator and we gave them all the tools they needed to do it. And then we finally managed it 60 hours in.”

Samanda?, until last week a town of roughly 120,000 people, has been destroyed. The bakery is totally submerged by rubble; the hospital was forced to close for several days after a second earthquake shook the area hours after the first, reopening with a makeshift operating theatre on the ground floor. The humid scent of the local plant shop still hangs in the air above shattered glass five days after the earthquakes first struck, two bright potted orchids positioned among the debris. Even Samanda?’s funeral home is unsafe to enter, large metal shards hanging from the ceiling that displayed a cavernous hole.

Like many residents, Bar?? and his parents now sleep in their car, afraid to enter their house for fear it might collapse. A soft, white, powdery dust from the debris has blown across the town, coating everything it touched. Rescue workers try to hush car noise to see if they could find any signs of life from under the rubble, but those signs are few and far between.

Despite the devastation, the government presence is light – security officials with a scattering of emergency workers and a small team attempting to find bodies long trapped under their homes. Many of those who did arrive to help distribute food, medicine and aid were sent by an Istanbul municipality linked to the country’s largest opposition party, amid little suggestion of government help to clear piles of rubble so high that it blocked the street in many places.

Samanda? is a town that has been left to save itself, with those left alive working to save their friends and neighbours from under the rubble. They fear the quake has brought the end of their community. Residents said that the central government in Ankara had long neglected Hatay province, a fertile and verdant strip of land filled with olive groves and citrus trees bordered by Syria’s Idlib province on one side and the Mediterranean sea on the other.

The earthquake’s aftermath, they said, simply showed how little the government cared to preserve what’s left of the province and its diverse people – sects who have lived side by side for millennia among ancient synagogues, churches, mosques and antiquities. The province and its rich history have survived many earthquakes, including the Antioch earthquake which occurred in 115 AD and was estimated to be of similar force to the deadly quake that struck this week.

But those who were left in Samanda? said they feared the destruction wrought by the latest earthquake was a death knell for their community, scattering Armenians, Alawites, Christians and Arabic-speaking Turks across the country to Turkey’s metropolitan cities as they were unable to stay in what was left of the town.

When the first earthquake struck in the early hours of the morning, those who found themselves alive immediately began to try and save their neighbours trapped under the rubble. The owner of a local hardware shop, Lami Do?ru, pulled tools out from under his destroyed store, and brandishing a vice grip and a hammer set to work.

“I started over there,” he said, pointing to his nephew’s house past a heap of broken concrete with pipes and a lamppost strewn next to air-conditioning units, chairs and twisted wrought-iron grating piled on top of the broken pieces. “I managed to save three people, although one of them was my cousin, who we lost.”

Do?ru attempted to be hopeful about Samanda?’s future and that the government would help rebuild it. “It will take a decade to get things back to how they were, if the state helps,” he said. “If not, maybe it could take up to 15 years. It was really a beautiful town.”

In the days since the earthquakes, many of those who survived have left Samanda?, abandoning the rubble of their homes for bigger cities.

Bar?? and his parents are debating whether they will remain. “When we were waiting in line at the morgue, the first question they asked us was: ‘What are you going to do after you bury your dead? Are you leaving?'” he said.

Days after recovering his grandparent’s bodies, transporting them to the morgue themselves in makeshift orange body bags as there was no one to help them, they returned to begin preparations to bury them. “When we searched the morgue for my grandparents, I found G?n?l Sakall? and her daughter laying next to each other in their body bags,” said Bar??.

“We were opening the bags to identify people and we suddenly found them. The thought suddenly struck me that a huge part of my childhood in our neighbourhood has been erased.”