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First Person
Amid grief and rage in Türkiye, community spirit shines through
Türkiye was already facing an ongoing financial and economic crisis with high inflation, rising borrowing costs and a plunging Turkish lira before the devastating earthquake on 6 February.
Published 15 February 2023 12:03pm
By Esra Doğramacı
Source: SBS News
Image: Türkiye and Syria have experienced the worst earthquakes to strike the region in almost a century. (Tunahan Turhan/SOPA Images)
Go to any large Turkish event, visit Istanbul or any major Turkish city that draws tourists, and chances are you will find an ‘Ottoman purveyor’ typically behind an ornate one-person stand.
A moustached man wearing a crimson fez (cylindrical hat), long white shirt, red embroidered vest, and wielding sticky ice cream at the end of a long metal spatula.
Sticky ice cream that doesn’t seem to fall off despite the flipping, twirling, placing a cone in the customer's hand, then the ice cream disappearing - all part of the spectacle - ending with the punching of a bell after a sale has been made.
Or perhaps you’ve been to Türkiye and seen the ice cream shop-come-cafe Mado (there are more than 300 of them).
Mado is an abbreviated version of maraş dondurması, or maraş ice cream. Maraş being a familiar shortened name for Kahramanmaraş - the home of the sticky ice cream and 50km from the epicentre of the 6 February earthquake where the loss of lives numbers 33,000 just over a week on.
The number of deaths is more than the capacity of Sydney’s CommBank Stadium. It’s almost the size of Geelong’s GMHBA Stadium. The first earthquake struck at 4:17am, when most of the victims would be sleeping. The second hit at 1:24pm on the same day, with 60 more aftershocks reported.
Turkish officials have responded to the outrage by announcing a rapid series of investigations and arrests linked to the construction and development business. Source: AAP / Balkis Press/ABACA/PA/Alamy
Were concerns over Türkiye's building standards ignored?
I’m a first-generation Australian, born and raised in Sydney, with intermittent trips to Türkiye as a child and stronger memories when I went to complete my first master's degree in 2005.
After staying up late studying on campus in Ankara one night, there was an earth tremor.
Ankara, in the central Anatolian heartland, is not earthquake-prone. Still, all my classmates started texting each other in the age before smartphones to confirm our suspicions.
One friend told me "don’t worry, your great uncle (after whom the university is named), would have built this place properly," insinuating well-known thoughts - that construction cuts corners in favour of profit, the dilution of building materials for the same reason.
I would lie in my student apartment then, and in the years on during visits after graduating, looking at the crack in the ceiling of the ground floor apartment, wondering if I should be concerned about it, and what would happen if a stronger earth tremor came along.
My mother tells me that in new modern builds, including where she’s lived for the past two decades, water and electric utilities won’t be connected until the tenant can show proof of earthquake insurance.
The flattened apartment buildings are all familiar - Türkiye is dotted with the same medium and high-density housing. Australia's population density is three people per square kilometre, Türkiye's is 111.
In many communities, the ground floor of these apartments are commercial - they’ll have banks, hairdressers, beauticians and mini-marts. In 2020, claims surfaced after the Izmir earthquake that one such mini-mart had removed the ground floor foundations, to make their deliveries easier to manoeuvre through the store.
A family living in an apartment above had apparently taken them to court, but nothing eventuated. When the earthquake hit, the building collapsed. The same murmurings are being heard in the country's southeast.
A child is pulled to safety from the rubble of a collapsed building, some 52 hours after a major earthquake, in Hatay Source: EPA / ERDEM SAHIN/EPA
AFAD, Türkiye's Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, had their own building in one of the affected areas collapse, adding to the criticism of the initial government response and raising questions such as whether the entity itself had complied with building regulations and why technology and building practice in Japan - another earthquake-prone country -had not been learned and adapted in Türkiye.
From grief and rage to hope and helping hands
Emotions undulate between grief, hope and rage. In Hatay, a Reuters picture shows a man peering out at rescuers two days after the earthquake brought down his home.
In the same frame, face down is his dead wife Esra - my namesake.
It's all familiar, it's all close to home. The entire country has mobilised, giving, and contributing what they can. This in a country that, since 2018, is facing an ongoing financial and economic crisis with high inflation, rising borrowing costs and a plunging Turkish lira.
Ordinary life has stopped. Looking at my social feeds for friends, companies, news and others, everyone has turned their attention to help or contribute in some way.
The vibrant Aegean restaurant Asma Yapragi (Vine Leaves), with an Instagram account full of colour, food, and dream-like glass house and al fresco dining, posts now about collective Aegean hospitality establishments banding together to send food.
The Turkish women's ice hockey team, due to compete at the World Championships in South Africa from 20 February, has withdrawn from the competition, with the connections reaching the ice community in Sydney. There was a moment of silence before the Sydney Sirens' last home game on February 11, and a call for donations for Turkish and Syrian earthquake victims was made.
Everyone knows someone who is affected. That is the nature of Turkish society with wide arms, extended families and layers of connections.
Families are digging graves without municipal help, the feeling of being overwhelmed is too great. We scroll through social posts looking for pockets of hope, yet met with ever-frequent tragedy and trauma.
Rescue workers from Mexico and the United States work at the scene in an attempt to reach two young people still alive in a collapsed building in Antakya. Source: AAP / SOPA Images/Sipa USA/
As the hope of finding survivors fades, inspiration lies in humanity, notably in Türkiye's supposed political adversaries all lined up help, together with rescue, medics and other specialist teams spanning from China to Cuba to Indonesia and more.
The land bridge connecting Armenia to Türkiye has opened for the first time in 30 years, sending humanitarian supplies, as well as teams to help with search and rescue. Greek rescuers were amongst the first on scene, as well as an Israeli team.
Esra Doğramacı is the Managing Editor, Digital for SBS News and Current Affairs
