This unique part of Turkey was devastated by an earthquake. Why residents say they’ve been largely abandoned

But at 4:17 a.m. the next morning, Feb. 6, 2023, twin 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes levelled hundreds of towns in southern Turkey. Hatay was the worst hit.

Lami awoke as his apartment shook violently. He saw its walls crack. A horrifying clamour of people screaming reverberated through a storm of tumbling furniture and shattering glass.

Tuğae briefly saw her mother across the hall and cried out in panic. Then the building collapsed. Tuğae was severely injured by dense beams crashing down on her arms.

In the rubble, Lami was also pinned down by debris. His neck was broken. He held heavy pieces of wreckage above him to preserve space to breathe.

“It felt like the end of our world,” Lami said, his eyes brimming with tears.

Hatay, Turkey’s southernmost province, suffered the worst of the earthquakes’ effects, with millions homeless and 53,000 killed. That official national number, locals say, is an extreme underestimation. It’s possible that hundreds of thousands of people have yet to be found.

Recently the Star travelled to Hatay to report on the state of recovery. Among the people who shared their stories were Lami and Tuğae.

“I was in so much pain, I was hoping for death,” Lami said.

“I thought nobody would come to save us.”

As the hours passed, it seemed he was right.

Lami and Tuğae lay for 18 hours under the rubble of their apartment before being rescued by Lami’s son, daughter-in-law and friends.

The amateur rescue team worked in the rain and cold for two more days to find Evrensel, making a fire with the remnants of the family’s precious furniture to stay warm. They found her too late. Evrensel was dead.

A year and a half after the quake, the ruined towns and cities of Hatay sit frozen in time in the chaotic aftermath. 

Hatay, which joined the Turkish republic in 1939, the last province to do so, is a crossroads of civilizations, where many religious groups have lived together for centuries. The region is home to a breathtaking mosaic of Sunni Arabs, Shia Alawites, Sunni Turks, Kurds, Jews and Christians who lived in harmony among ancient churches, mosques and synagogues.

Antakya’s main street housed magnificent houses of worship for three of the world’s prominent faiths: Habib-i Neccar Mosque, constructed in the seventh century, St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church, near where believers were first given the name “Christian,” and the historic Antakya Synagogue, which served the once-thriving 2,300-year-old Jewish community.

It was a community like no other in Turkey, where most communities have been homogenized into Sunni Muslim-Turkish culture.

“We loved having friends from many different ethnicities,” Lami, a Sunni Turk, said recently.

“Everyone shared and respected each other’s traditions.”

An estimated four million buildings were damaged by the earthquakes, according to international reports, and about 300,000 buildings collapsed or were damaged beyond repair, according to Turkish statistics.

Along street after street, homes, businesses and offices remain upended, ripped open or crumbled. There are few new buildings to be seen, and there is scant evidence of construction underway. Hundreds of thousands of people still live in container cities and tents.

Some residents fear the government has forgotten them. Others argue the sheer scale of the destruction makes rebuilding infeasible. But many say Turkey’s religious-nationalistic government, led by authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been reluctant to help because it dislikes the very mosaic of cultures that made Hatay such a gem of diversity.

Lami is not optimistic. He and Tuğae, who spent two months in the hospital recovering, live in an uninsulated summer cabin in the beach town of Arsuz, where entire hotels disintegrated into the sand.

The family is still grieving Evrensel and their lost neighbours, who were Sunni-Turks, Sunni-Arabs, Shia Alawites, Christians and Kurds.

“We hope to rebuild in Antakya,” Lami said, “But we worry our community is lost forever.”

The Star spoke with people like Lami from many of the cultural groups that made up the broad Hatay community. The sense that something special has been lost is widespread, as is the fear that it might not be restored for political reasons, not just cost.

That fear may be real. Politically, Hatay’s elected representatives have long been part of Erdoğan’s opposition. After the earthquake, the president enraged many locals by suggesting his support of reconstruction would be tied to how they voted in the May 2023 election. He called Hatay “garip,” according to local media, a word that denotes someone who is poor, freakish or alone.

Voters in Hatay obliged. They supported Erdogan’s re-election by a slim margin. But government support has still disappointed survivors.

Erdogan told Hatay residents in February that his government had delivered 280,000 tents, 71,000 containers and hosted 38,000 people in public buildings. He said that 7,275 houses had been completed and 40,000 new buildings were underway.

But in Hatay, thousands of buildings are still uninhabitable.

As the Star travelled to different parts of this cultural mosaic, it was clear many want the diversity that defined Hatay to survive.

In the village of Vakifli, the dominant culture is Armenian. Here, the dust from broken buildings and piles of rubble obscures the scent of ripe citrus and pomegranate trees in the gardens. Vakifli is the only Armenian town left in Turkey. The quake levelled three-quarters of the town’s stone houses. But one of the few buildings restored is the historic church, which now stands above the rubble, waving the flag, a lonely warrior.

Another town, Samandağ, is home mostly to Shia Alawites, who speak Arabic and face persecution and social exclusion outside of Hatay for their form of Islam. On a stretch of highway outside the community, Aysel Büzel, 66, tended to a vegetable stand serving one of the region’s many sprawling container cities as the hot sun bore down on her tent.

“The government people came and took photos and then left again,” said Büzel, who is Alawite.

Most families in the camp endured a year living in small tents before moving into cramped prefabricated shacks, known locally as containers, placed just inches apart. The camp offers little privacy or space for recreation. Many children attend schools in container units, where plastic walls and corrugated metal roofs lead to oppressive heat in summer and bitter cold in winter.

As southern Turkey’s bitter winter draws near, residents are worried about enduring the intense winds along the coast and temperatures that dip below freezing. Last winter, the sea rose across the highway and flooded the area.

“I am very disappointed in our government,” Büzel said, shaking her head. “They have disappeared.”

Although many citizens, like Büzel, blame Erdogan directly, other political and economic pressures have contributed to the chaos.

Evren Altinkas, a professor of history at the University of Guelph, forced to take refuge in Canada in 2018 because of his anti-government views, said although Hatay was the worst hit, 10 other damaged provinces are vying for the government’s meagre resources.

Altinkas did not see an overt policy against Hatay. Instead, he described more subtle influences, as much about simple politics as about diversity. Conflicts between Erdogan and Hatay’s opposition-party provincial leaders have almost inevitably slowed progress.

“It is a political game, and the people of Hatay have been victimized as a result.”

Rebuilding is also stalled because critical infrastructure such as roads, hospitals and schools remain shattered, and workers are in scarce supply. At least 10 per cent of Hatay’s population has left the province, seeking brighter futures elsewhere.

“In order to build new houses, you need to remove the debris,” Altinkas said. “But in order to move the debris, you need workers. … Everyone who is able is leaving.”

One of those who has already left is Nikola Baikoğlu, a soft-spoken, 49-year-old hair salon owner. A multi-ethnic Arab-Turk, Baikoğlu, survived that cold night of unimaginable horror with his wife Rana, 36, and five-year-old daughter Ariana.

Baikoğlu’s world in Iskenderun, Hatay’s largest city, fell to pieces. Countless friends and half his salon clients died when their homes crumbled and the city’s Mediterranean shoreline sunk 80 centimetres and flooded the ruins.

The family now lives in Toronto, part of Canada’s program to support earthquake survivors as temporary residents.

But while Canada can offer safety, it cannot erase the grief of losing friends and Baikoğlu’s worry about his community.

“I worry that (Hatay) will not be back to its former state for a long time.”

Some can choose to leave, but not Hatay’s poor, among them an estimated 300,000 Syrian refugees. Their struggle to get government aid even in good times leaves them with no choice but to stay and live among the ruins. All they can hope for is that tolerance and friendship are built back along with the buildings.

Not far from the clock tower at the entrance to Antakya that still marks the time the first tremors struck, Busra, 14, and her Syrian family (who requested their surname remain confidential) tended to chores under the shade of a tarp.

Earlier in the day, the plastic shack that houses the family’s kitchen and living area, burned and melted in a fire. Scattered burn debris, including charred remnants of food, kitchenware and clothes, smouldered nearby, smelling of acrid smoke.

The family was not provided a place in one of the container cities, Busra said, so the six family members huddle together with their small flock of chickens in a few makeshift shacks. A barbed-wire fence of a container city blocks them on one side and a busy highway roars past on the other.

Büsra’s parents appear haggard, their eyes reflecting a deep, unsettling desperation. Although they have lived in Turkey for 10 years, they have been told they may be homeless for another three.

“It is better than living in Syria,” Busra’s father said, forcing a smile.

Turkey may be a better place to live than Syria, but other grim hallmarks of authoritarian rule, such as government corruption and economic mismanagement, have contributed to Hatay’s despair.

The government was unprepared for a tragedy of this magnitude, even though southern Turkey is a known earthquake zone, said Levent Hakki Yilmaz, president of Iskenderun’s Chamber of Commerce.

“Many buildings were not built to survive an earthquake,” Yilmaz said, referring to widespread construction corruption, where, for a fee, the government has long allowed structures to be built without safety certificates.

Reconstruction is obstructed too by Turkey’s deep economic crisis, which economists say is a result of Erdogan’s political intervention and “unconventional” approach to economics.

With inflation now reaching 70 per cent and interest rates at 50 per cent, almost all investment in Hatay has stopped, Yilmaz said. Many businesses have shuttered, and most people cannot afford to borrow to rebuild.

Yilmaz also worries that other Turkish citizens, pressed with a nationalist ideology that favors the Sunni-Turkish majority, are losing their compassion.

“The rest of Turkey doesn’t understand what’s happening here,” he said.

Among the chaos and crumbled buildings, Hatay’s souls also seek repair.

In one of the new graveyards outside Antakya, a tour guide named Mariam Gundüz looks sombrely at hundreds of fresh gravesites, many of which have no markers.

Gundüz, whose energy makes her seem much younger than her 38 years, has struggled in the last 19 months. It is hard for her to shake the memories of being pinned down under a wardrobe for hours, then wandering cold and alone in streets and hearing people screaming under the rubble. Hundreds of her friends and neighbours perished that ghastly night. Some of their bodies have not been found.

For several months after the earthquake, Gundüz left Hatay to recover from the trauma. Back today, she still sleeps only a few hours at a time, fully dressed, on a couch, with a water bottle in her hand and her phone fully charged. Despite her fears, Gundüz plans to stay, with the hope that the joy Hatay once spawned will be restored.

“The trauma never leaves me,” she said, “But I want nothing more than for Hatay to rise again. It was a paradise.”

The realities an earthquake lays bare are symbolic.

On that street in Antakya with all those houses of worship, the earthquake took them all. They were united in their suffering.

But today, the shambles of the earthquakes are symbolic of something quite different: that Turkish minorities are marginalized by the government.

That day of the earthquake, Lami waited an unbearably long time for help, but it came. It was not from the government. It was from family, friends and neighbours. Maybe it will be the same for Hatay.