hankyoreh

Numbers and names written on small wooden boards — these are what remain to mark the senseless ends of lives lost in the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria.

On Saturday afternoon, the Hankyoreh’s reporters headed to a cemetery where earthquake victims were being buried in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş. Not knowing the precise location, we were obliged to follow a funeral procession as it left one of the scenes of devastation.

The cars were moving quickly, and we ended up losing them along the way. But that didn’t matter: even the children playing ball by the side of the road knew exactly where “it” was. Heading to the location the children identified, we once again saw the funeral cars converging.

The place where the victims were being buried was originally used as a public cemetery in Kahramanmaraş, we were told. Indeed, a car ride up the gentle slope showed the original cemetery off to the right.

With roughly 3 by 3 meter spaces marked off with bricks, the small original cemetery had stones bearing the names of victims and the dates of their birth and deaths. While the state of the upkeep varied, the occupants were all “equal” in the sense that they had gone to their final rest in small, neatly divided spaces.

For the earthquake victims’ resting place, in contrast, any separation or gravestones was a luxury. Looking to the left of a path that appeared to have once been a vacant lot, one could see the places where the brown dirt swelled up in the distance.

All that existed to identify the deceased were small wooden boards, which appeared to have names and numbers written on them. There was no standard spacing to the boards, which appeared in different shapes.

A few of the boards had colorful scarves tied to them — suggesting that the family members had done whatever they could.

The burial process was as heart-wrenching as the deaths themselves. The gravel lot was a jumble of funeral cars, police cars, and family members’ vehicles. People who had lost their loved ones wept and held each other up as they walked down the bumpy path.

“Over 5,000 people to date have been buried here,” explained a local police officer at the site.

According to police, this location is where all of the earthquake victims from Kahramanmaraş have been brought. White funeral cars never stopped arriving during the 30 minutes or so that we spent looking around the cemetery.

Press coverage in the cemetery was heavily restricted. The reporters present that afternoon had to face off against the police watching over the site. Both still and video photography were prohibited outright, and reporters were even stopped from recording the things we saw and heard in our notebooks.

The police explained that a photography team from New Zealand had caused problems with their overly aggressive coverage approach.

“You are not allowed to talk to the family members or approach them. You cannot help out in any way besides watching quietly from a distance,” we were told.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that a large makeshift cemetery had also been created on the outskirts of Antakya in Hatay Province.

The agency described a scene where backhoes and bulldozers dug pits to one side as trucks and ambulances on the other carried in black body bags and wooden markers stood in front of hundreds of graves separated by a space of less than one meter.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an official with the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs was quoted by the AP as saying that 800 bodies had arrived on the day of the cemetery’s opening last Friday, with 2,000 buried at the site as of noon the next day.

As of Sunday, the earthquake’s death toll in Türkiye and Syria was counted at over 29,000.

In an interview in Adana with the UK broadcaster Sky on Saturday, Martin Griffiths, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, predicted that tens of thousands more might be found dead.

“I think it is difficult to estimate [the death toll] precisely, as we need to get under the rubble, but I'm sure it will double or more,” he said.

Due to delays in international relief efforts, the difficulties have been even greater in Syria, where the earthquakes happened in a landscape already devastated by 12 years of civil war. The UN estimates that around 5.3 million people may have lost their homes in Syria alone.

By Cho Hae-yeong, staff reporter; Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]