The trauma of seeing her ancient home city of Antakya turned into unrecognisable ruins is too much for the 41-year-old to bear.
"Our Hatay is gone. Completely gone," Aydin said at one of the depressingly cramped container homes the government has built for survivors across the devastated Hatay province of which Antakya is the capital.
"I want to go to the cemetery to visit our children but I simply can't. I just don't want to see the city in that state. I get physically sick. My sugar levels spike."
The February 6, 2023, disaster killed more than 50,000 people and erased swathes of entire cities across Turkey's southeast in the middle of the night.
No place was affected more than Antakya -- a mountain-rimmed cradle of Muslim and Christian civilisations known throughout history as Antioch.
Ninety percent of its buildings were lost and more than 20,000 people died in the city and its surrounding province.
Antakya's survivors have been left to deal with the shock in fenced-off camps comprised of hundreds of identical homes that look like shipping containers.
Families have access to running water and power that the government offers for free.
But grim-faced police guarding their entrances give these miniature metal cities the air of prison camps.
- 'No purpose' -
Cagla Ezer sits on the opposite end of the flattened city in a similar container and mourns the life she has lost.
"There is never any excitement any more. No purpose," the 31-year-old mother of two said.
"The goal is to get through another day, to survive the day unharmed."
Local leaders estimate that Hatay's population has shrunk to 250,000 from 1.7 million since the quake. Nearly 190,000 had been housed in containers by November.
Most of those who remained in the province had no relatives to stay with in other parts of Turkey or were simply too attached to their land.
But that land bears little resemblance to what stood before the first 7.8-magnitude quake struck.
Antakya has been transformed from a bustling city with a pulsating nightlife and ancient architecture into a patchwork of vast empty spaces and skeletal remains of buildings.
Standing all alone in the centre of one such debris-strewn field is the green metal container of Fevzi Sislioglu.
The 65-year-old throat cancer survivor set it up with the help of some kind-hearted neighbours at the spot where his hardware store once stood.
"I am selling whatever wasn't looted from my original store," Sislioglu said in a barely audible voice.
"I have no electricity here, no water and very few customers. But I have to keep going. I have to take care of my wife and two children."
- 'Morale boost' -
The remaining vendors of Antakya's Uzun Carsi bazaar -- a partially covered network of 1,500 shops that was once an important stop on the ancient Silk Road -- looked equally glum.
Officials intend to start bulldozing its remaining buildings as a safety precaution by May.
The plan is for a new and safer bazaar to emerge in its place.
"Hopefully we will see better days and have an even more beautiful market," shop association president Mehmet Hancer Gunduz said over a glass of turnip juice.
"I believe in that."
The glow coming from the Umut Et restaurant (meaning either "Umut's Meat" or "Keep the Hope") offers Resim Devir and his family a rare reason to smile.
The original eatery was destroyed and a new one built using only wood and steel.
Many survivors still fear entering cement buildings because so many of them crumbled and trapped initial survivors under tonnes of debris.
"It's one of the few places where you can escape the stress," Devir said over a multi-course meal.
"We need a morale boost to survive these days."
- Children's games -
Umut Et owner Mustafa Kassab thinks it will take at least one or two generations for Antakya to start resembling its former self -- and for normal business to return.
"People have still not been able to overcome the psychological effects of the earthquake," Kassab said. "And financially, they are strapped."
Yazgin Danisma can see the pain reflected in the games her three children play in the paved and soulless alleys between rows of containers in her fenced off camp.
"I can hear the children talk among themselves about running away. But I still want to live in Antakya," the 31-year-old said.
"The children have developed a fear. Whenever they play, the game always ends in a pretend earthquake," she said.
Fear, uncertainty and grief year after Turkey's quake
Istanbul (AFP) Jan 28, 2024 -
Over 65 nightmarish seconds of the pre-dawn hours of February 6, 2023, the ground swallowed swathes of entire cities across Turkey's southeast, resulting in more than 50,000 deaths.
The initial 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the ground as far away as Egypt.
Bridges collapsed, roads and airport tarmacs cracked, and millions of lives across 11 Turkish provinces were upturned by the time the rest of the country woke up, stunned.
A year later, hundreds of thousands remain displaced, many of them living in container cities, while the rest of the quake-prone country waits in fear for the next big shake.
"I had 3,700 registered voters. Only 1,300 are left," said Ali Karatosun, a mukhtar (village chief) in Kahramanmaras province, not far from the epicentre of Turkey's worst disaster of modern times.
More than 850,000 buildings crumbled in the initial quake and the thousands of aftershocks that followed, including a 7.5-magnitude one that afternoon.
In the Syrian border province of Hatay, where the ancient city of Antioch -- now called Antakya -- formed the cradle of Muslim and Christian civilisations, just 250,000 of the original 1.7 million inhabitants remain.
"Our Hatay is gone. Completely gone," said Mevlude Aydin, 41, who lost her daughter, husband and a dozen relatives.
- 'No money. No jobs' -
The disaster put enormous political pressure on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faced re-election later that year.
Responding to criticism that rescuers were too slow to react, leaving many initial survivors trapped under rubble in the freezing cold, the veteran leader promised to build 650,000 housing units within a year.
Eleven months later, the construction of 307,000 housing units has been launched, of which 46,000 have been delivered, according to environment and urbanisation ministry data.
In the meantime, families that chose to stay in the disaster zone and were unable to find accommodation have been housed in metal container homes the size of small studios.
The containers have access to free running water and power, offering safety and warmth. But families have few surviving possessions and their immediate prospects are unclear.
The Hatay region lost the same number of buildings in seconds as it usually takes a decade to build, an Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV) report found.
In Adiyaman province, at the opposite end of the quake zone, 40 percent of the buildings collapsed.
"The earthquake will create a financing need of approximately $150 billion over a five-year period," the economic policy institute said in a comprehensive report.
"The cost of reconstruction and rehabilitation will have a significant and long-term negative impact on the Turkish economy."
The affected region was already under intense economic strain, being home to half of the 3.7 million refugees who fled civil war in neighbouring Syria.
"No money. No jobs. We are far from returning to normal," said Kadir Yenicel, a 70-year-old in Kahramanmaras, echoing the worries of many across the disaster zone.
"People don't know what to do."
- 'Band-aid solutions' -
The instant collapse of so many buildings in one of the world's most earthquake-prone regions points to the greed of unscrupulous property developers and corruption among bureaucrats who signed off on unsafe building projects, experts say.
In two of the more egregious examples, nearly all 22 buildings in one high-rise complex collapsed in Kahramanmaras, claiming 1,400 lives, and hundreds more died when their luxurious Renaissance residence crumbled in Antakya.
The handful of wilful negligence cases opened so far have avoided prosecuting officials, focusing on contracts instead.
Meanwhile, Turkey is no better prepared for another earthquake than it was one year ago, experts say.
"There is still much to be done," said Mihat Kadioglu, a disaster management professor at Istanbul Technical University.
"Measures should go beyond mere band-aid solutions, and require a real and more fundamental reform."
While it caused temporary panic, particularly in quake-prone cities such as Istanbul, the disaster "did not lead to a change in behaviour among the public or officials", Kadioglu said.
And even if safety standards are better enforced, buildings could still fall if erected without proper soil studies or on dangerous terrain such as riverbeds, as was the case in Kahramanmaras, he said.
Dilfuroz Sahin, who heads the town planning chamber in southeastern Diyarbakir, struck a more optimistic tone, saying officials were updating their seismic maps and conducting "stricter, more numerous inspections".
Zihni Tekin, an engineering consultant, strongly disagreed, expressing disappointment that Erdogan overcame the quake to secure re-election last May.
Turkey's problems cannot be solved by "completely corrupt and ignorant people", he said, referring to Erdogan's Islamic-rooted AKP party.
Related Links
Bringing Order To A World Of Disasters
A world of storm and tempest
When the Earth Quakes
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
