The village in Turkey that Barış Yapar once called home now feels like anything but.
Yapar is from Samandag in the southern province of Hatay — the region of Turkey that took the brunt of last year’s devastating and deadly earthquake.
Samandag is just outside the city of Antakya, a cultural gem in Turkey that is home to revered historic sites and people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds.
“Now it looks like a decayed land,” Yapar told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“[There’s] rubble that’s still not cleared out. The smell is still not gone. The water is still not clean. The more you walk, the more you inhale this horrible dust into your lungs and your eyes start getting a little red. And you just feel lost.”
Tuesday marks one year since a 7.8-magnitude quake struck southern Turkey and Syria. More than 59,000 people were killed, including 6,000 in neighbouring Syria.
While the government orchestrated nationwide events to mark the grim anniversary, residents protested that much of the region is still in a state of disrepair, hundreds of people are still unaccounted for and thousands more remain displaced in tents and makeshift shelters.
Working in a parking lot
Yapar lives in Cyprus where he attends university. But he was visiting his parents in Samandag when the quake struck.
His parents’ house was badly damaged, but they managed to escape. His grandparents, however, were not so lucky. Their apartment a few blocks away was reduced to rubble, with them trapped underneath.
The night of the quake, Yapar spoke to As It Happens from a parking lot in Samandag, where he and his parents had taken refuge inside their car.
One year later, he says his father still works out of a tent in that same parking lot. His office was destroyed in the earthquake and has yet to re-open. Many others live in that lot — either in tents, mobile homes or makeshift shelters.
The earthquake forced about 2.4 million people from their homes into temporary settlements, according to the charity Save The Children. Today, more 761,000 people — including 205,000 children — are yet to return home.
Yapar’s parents also lived in a tent for five months after the quake, until they found a one-bedroom apartment to rent in Antakya.
Meanwhile, he says there’s been no time to mourn.
“[The] earthquake has taken the privilege of people to grieve appropriately,” he said. “After, for example, we found my grandparents’ [remains], it was just, like, a huge race of taking them to a morgue and then taking them out the next day and then burying them, and then going back to the car and then trying to figure out how to survive.”
Not everyone has had even that much closure.
Selahattin Kaban, head of the Association for Solidarity with Earthquake Victims and Relatives of the Missing, said 140 people, including 38 children, are still missing since the quake.
Day of mourning
On Tuesday, millions of people in Turkey took time to mourn — and to protest.
To mark what it calls the “Disaster of the Century,” the government arranged a series of events to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the disaster.
In Antakya, there was a moment of silence at 4:17 a.m., which is when the earthquake hit, after which people tossed flowers into the river in an act of remembrance, while a local orchestra played a song.
Crowds in Adiyaman held a silent march, passing a clock tower that for the past year has shown the time of the earthquake.
But the day wasn’t all quiet and sombre.
In Antakya, crowds clashed with police, called on Mayor Lutfu Savas to resign, and jeered and booed during Health Minister Fahrettin Koca’s speech.
Amid the fog by the Orontes River, people chanted “Can anyone hear me?” — echoing the voices of those buried under the rubble a year ago — and “We won’t forget, we won’t forgive.”
Sebnem Yesil, 22, criticized both the government and opposition politicians such as Savas.
“I think they have been extremely disrespectful,” she said. “It has been a year, they never came and now they’re here for a ceremony…. You didn’t hear our voices, you didn’t help, at least let us grieve.”
In Cyprus, Yapar watched these events unfold on live video.
“I couldn’t actually sleep,” he said. “It was a pretty rough morning.”
Broken promises, and a new home lottery
As part of the anniversary events, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan oversaw a lottery for newly built homes in Kahramanmaras, the quake’s epicentre. Families that were picked out of the draw were called to the stage to receive the keys to their new homes from Erdogan in a nationally broadcast ceremony.
As he handed them their keys, Erdogan said the government aims to deliver 200,000 homes across the quake zone by the end of the year.
Yapar is skeptical that will happen. Since the quake, he says the government has only delivered a series of unfulfilled promises.
“Once the elections passed, everything about the earthquake and all the promises and so on were just like, they all just froze in time. So it’s only people, if they have enough money and opportunities, rebuilding things for themselves to get a sense of normality,” he said.
In Syria, too, rebuilding looks increasingly unlikely. Mads Brinch Hansen, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross delegation to Syria, told reporters in Geneva that there were few prospects for post-earthquake reconstruction in the war-battered country.
“We don’t have the funding to even think of going into larger scale rehabilitation and reconstruction,” he said.
Yapar says his parents would like to rebuild. But the government expropriated their house under a controversial new law passed late last year allowing the federal government to seize homes it says are risk of disaster.
“All of a sudden one morning my dad woke up and he received an SMS [text message] saying that your property has been approved to be transferred to the Ministry of Heritage,” he said
Nobody, he says, has been able to tell them what that means for their future.
“Are we going to be placed back into our houses, in our own locations? Or are we going to be placed somewhere else? Or are we going to be sent to a different district?”
Yapar says he’d like return home after he finishes his degree — but he doesn’t know if he’ll have one to return to.
“I’m still not able to go back and build myself a future,” he said. “Everything feels a little too up in the air.”