Tens of 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, claiming more than 53,000 lives in Turkey and some 6,000 in neighbouring 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, 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, the 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.
Alongside the sobbing and grief there was also anger as people walked through the city centre, with demonstrators carrying a huge banner reading: “We will not forget, we will not forgive. We will hold them accountable!”
“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 the police who detained three marchers, the city’s local newspaper reported.
The incident prompted angry shouting from the crowd who demanded “the government’s resignation”, it said.
“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 the massive rebuilding effort in Antakya, which like everywhere across the quake zone, has been transformed into one massive construction site.
During the morning, the city’s Christians were expected to hold a joint mass for the dead in front of the ruins of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Central Council of Oriental Christians said on X.
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.
In a statement, Erdogan said the tragedy “shook us all deeply, opened great wounds in our hearts, and left indelible marks in our nation’s memory,” saying his administration had “never stopped helping the regions affected by the earthquake even for a moment”.
“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 who is expected to attend a remembrance ceremony in Adiyaman, a province that lost over 8,000 people, later in the day.
So far, nearly 201,500 homes have been given to survivors in the vast region affected by the earthquake, and the keys to some 220,000 more are to be handed over by the year’s end, according to the urban planning ministry.
“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, whose home in Antakya collapsed on top of her, killing her entire family.
“That fear is always with you,” the 34-year-old told AFP.
Two years on, 189 people have received prison sentences over the disaster, many for negligence, according to the justice ministry. There are another 1,342 trials involving 1,850 defendants still under way.
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, with urban planning minister Murat Kurum warning again of the risk of a “big one” hitting Istanbul, which lies just 15 kilometres from the North Anatolian faultline.
In 1999, a rupture on this fault caused a 7.4-magnitude earthquake, killing 17,000 people, including 1,000 in Istanbul.
“Istanbul does not have the strength to withstand another earthquake” of such magnitude, said Kurum who said “millions of our Istanbul brothers and sisters live in 600,000 homes that could collapse”.
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