Death has lost its scent, but it still haunts these fields of ruins one year, to the day, after having taken away everything in its path. Kahramanmaras, a hard-working and conservative city in Turkey’s deep South, was hit hard by the gigantic earthquake of February 6, 2023. Officially, 53,537 people died there, almost a third of them here.
On the heights of Boulevard Vezir-Hoca, which runs straight towards the city center, two out of three buildings were ravaged by the earthquake and its aftershocks. The others, uninhabitable, were evacuated and emptied, promised to be demolished in the future. Only a few buildings in the neighborhood are still standing, powerless to console the extreme desolation around them.
Phone in hand, bag slung over shoulder, Tuba Erdemoglu turns over stones and shards of concrete with the slow and precise gesture of those who have learned instinctively to survive. “I need to accumulate evidence”, she explains, in a blank voice. Under his feet lie the remains of the Said-Bey building, the name given during its construction, in 2016, to these two joined buildings, rather modern and chic at the time, a block A and a block B, eight floors each, nine if we count the mezzanine. Everything here was crushed and cleared in the months following the disaster to find the bodies: forty-four to date; forty-five if we add a child still missing, for only twenty-five survivors.
“The building collapsed in eight seconds”
Tuba Erdemoglu herself dug and searched for her family members for three days and three nights, with her bare hands. The building took his sister, his mother, his father and his grandfather. Only his 75-year-old grandmother survived. The living room couch she had been lying on that night overturned and served as a protective cap. She now lives alone in one of the fifty container cities in the city.
“Buildings collapsed everywhere, but not like thisshe slips. The Said-Bey building was sold to us as being the safest and most respectful of seismic standards, it completely collapsed on itself in eight seconds. Like that, at once, the two blocks, in the time of a breath. No other building in the neighborhood has flattened like this. »
Together with the survivors, she took the case to court. A collective action of twenty-five women and men of all ages and all conditions, a true microcosm of a battered country. There is an army officer, a Koran teacher, a fifty-year-old tradesman, a beautician, all irreparably scarred, but whose complaint was accepted by the prosecution of the city’s criminal court, triggering one of the very first major lawsuits in the region opened against developers of damaged buildings. The preliminary hearing, in early December 2023, lasted almost thirteen hours. The second, January 19, just a little less.
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