Antakya, Turkey — Thousands of survivors held torchlit vigils across southern Turkey at 4:17 am Thursday, expressing pain and anger as they marked the exact moment two years ago when a devastating earthquake struck that led to the deaths of over 53,000 people in Turkey and some 6,000 in Syria.
The 7.8 magnitude quake struck before dawn when people were sleeping, destroying almost 40,000 buildings and severely damaging about 200,000 others in Turkey, leaving huge numbers trapped under the rubble.
“Although two years have passed, we are still hurting. It still feels like it did on that first day. That hasn’t changed,” survivor Emine Albayrak, 25 told AFP in Antakya, site of the ancient city of Antioch, which lost 90 percent of its buildings.
More than 20,000 people died in Antakya and the surrounding province.
“Can anybody hear me?” the crowd chanted, echoing the calls of those trapped under the wreckage in freezing temperatures for hours or days before help came.
Crossing a bridge, many threw red carnations into the Orontes River to remember the victims.
But alongside the grief, there was also anger with mourners carrying a huge banner reading: “We will not forget, we will not forgive. We will hold them accountable!”
The collapse of so many structures in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone areas pointed to the greed of unscrupulous developers and corrupt bureaucrats who rubber-stamped unsafe projects on unsuitable land.
“This was not an earthquake, this was a massacre!” they chanted, their voices echoing eerily through the night.
Security forces set up barricades and prevented marchers from reaching a certain area, prompting scuffles with police who detained three people, prompting the crowd to call for “the government’s resignation, Antakya’s local newspaper reported.
Later in the morning, Christians gathered under a gazebo outside the ruins of Antakya’s 14th-century Greek Orthodox church, a mournful chant for the dead cutting through the air, live footage showed.
– ‘Feels like yesterday’ –
“Two years have passed, but it still feels like yesterday for me,” admitted Humeysa Bagriyanik, who was 16 when the earthquake hit.
“I feel like a stranger in my hometown now. Our city was razed to the ground and now I don’t recognise anything,” she said of Antakya which has been transformed into a massive construction site.
Dubbed the “disaster of the century” by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the earthquake left nearly two million people homeless. Two years on, some 670,000 survivors are still living in containers.
“We will continue our rebuilding and restoration efforts with hard work, sweat, patience and an iron will until our cities are back on their feet,” said Erdogan in a statement.
He will attend an afternoon remembrance ceremony in Adiyaman, a province that lost over 8,000 people.
So far, nearly 201,500 homes have been given to survivors in the quake zone, with the government saying the keys to 220,000 more will be handed over by the year’s end.
“Whenever I enter a room, the first place I look is the ceiling: would it hold up in an earthquake, or would I be trapped under the rubble?” said Sema Genc, 34, whose home collapsed on top of her, killing her entire family.
“That fear is always with you.”
– New earthquake fears –
Two years on, 189 people have been jailed over the disaster, many for negligence, justice ministry figures show. And 1,342 trials involving 1,850 defendants are ongoing.
Over the past week, repeated earthquakes in the Aegean Sea near the Greek island of Santorini, have raised fears of a major tremor that could affect southwestern Turkey.
Urban planning minister Murat Kurum warned this week of a “big one” hitting Istanbul, which lies just 15 kilometres (nine miles) from the North Anatolian faultline.
In 1999, a rupture on this fault caused a 7.4-magnitude earthquake, killing 17,000, including 1,000 in Istanbul.
“Istanbul does not have the strength to withstand another earthquake” of such magnitude, he said, warning the city had “600,000 homes that could collapse”.
