When you see the path of a wildfire, it’s always a bit mysterious why some places are obliterated while others remain untouched. It’s like that in Antakya, Turkey, the city hardest hit by the devastating February 6 earthquake. Sometimes, whole city blocks are destroyed. On other streets, only a single building or two has collapsed while the rest remain cracked but standing. But the city, which has been continuously inhabited since Roman times and was one of the early centers of Christianity, is now largely erased.
When the buildings fell, the destruction was total. Often, what remains is just a pile of broken concrete and twisted rebar. Occasionally a child’s toy, some family photos, or stray bits of clothing poke out of the rubble, but mostly it is hard to imagine life there at all. In rare cases, a single room is nearly intact, sitting awkwardly on top of the ruins. In one, a neatly packed dish-drying rack, the dishes unbroken. In another, a TV and a wall of family photos, the rest of the room utter ruin.
The destroyed old city of Antakya. On February 6, 2023, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit central and southern Turkey, and Northern Syria. It was followed by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake. It is estimated that there were 45,000 deaths in Turkey, and approximately 7,000 in Syria.
A layer of fine dust hangs in the air, sometimes mixing with the smell of corpses as diggers overturn slabs of concrete. Some neighborhoods are entirely silent, save for stray animals wandering the ruins. A dog, seemingly half insane, searches frantically for its owner. Other blocks are almost agonizingly loud, as the metal treads of giant construction machines scrape and squeal over the rubble.
In the first days, families kept vigil, sitting on a motley assortment of salvaged chairs. In certain rare miracles, they witnessed their loved ones being saved, but mostly they just waited for their bodies.
As dusk fell, a group of Turkish rescue workers found a wallet belonging to a sister of the Çelik family. A woman called Senem rushed forward and grasped it to her breast, then started yanking things out and tossing them to the ground as she ran crying into the waiting arms of her loved ones. A rescue worker carefully picked up the discarded money and handed it quietly to her relatives.
Scattered around the sites of collapsed buildings are chairs where family members keep vigil waiting for rescue workers to discover the remains of loved ones, or in rare cases, find them alive.
I’ve documented a number of massive natural and man-made catastrophes. When I arrived in Thailand after the 2004 Tsunami there were dead tourists in the thousands laid out on the floor of a temple grounds, stacked with dry ice in a feeble attempt to keep off the decay. In Haiti, in 2010, I was on an aid convoy following the earthquake which found itself, through poor planning and chaotic circumstances, unable to deliver badly needed supplies. Crowds of hungry people trotted after the vehicles begging for help.
I’ve never become accustomed to the site of horrible things, but over time a certain familiarity blunts some of the surface edges. Yet the scale of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is so vast that no experience could prepare me for what I saw.
As the days pass, it has become increasingly clear that widespread corruption and lack of accountability led to criminally shoddy building standards in the rapidly growing cities. And for some buildings, the quake was simply too powerful.
A rescue worker removes debris from a collapsed apartment block. The rescue workers suspect someone might still be alive in the building, but an hour-long rescue proves fruitless.
