More than 20,000 people died in Antioch and surrounding province, while the city lost 90% of its buildings in the earthquake.
| Photo Credit: AFP
Mevlude Aydin cannot bring herself to visit the graves of her daughter and husband or the dozen other relatives she lost in Turkiye’s catastrophic earthquake one year ago.
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,” Ms. 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.
The February 6, 2023, disaster killed more than 50,000 people and erased swathes of entire cities across Turkiye’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. 90% of its buildings were lost and more than 20,000 people died in the city and its surrounding province.
Container city
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.
Local leaders estimate that Hatay’s population has shrunk to 2,50,000 from 1.7 million since the quake. Nearly 1,90,000 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 Turkiye 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 pulsating nightlife and ancient architecture into a patchwork of vast empty spaces and skeletal remains of buildings.
