No homes for the living, no graves for the dead

Walking towards the Zübeyde Hanım district and the nearby neighbourhoods that were settled in the land, we had to be cautious not to stumble over more bodies.

In the early morning, more black or gray bags, individually or in groups, lay on the sides of the roads next to the families sitting around fires, waiting for any news. 

The hope then was to find people alive under the rubble, diminished or evaporated. Now efforts are focused on retrieving the dead in a strange juxtaposition of life and death.

Here, the living no longer have homes and the deceased have no graves to rest. Instead, waiting and stillness prevail over everything.

Reuters

While the snowstorm that struck the area a day or two before the earthquake was a curse on the quake survivors who spent their nights out in the open, it helped, to some extent, preserve the bodies of those who were killed under the rubble for five days or more. 

The city was relatively protected from another disaster, the spread of rodents and epidemics, at a time when the majority of hospitals and refrigerators were out of service.

Another dilemma was the extraction of the vast number of victims. On the one hand, official cemeteries were completely filled in the first two days of the catastrophe, although they were expanded.

On the other, no one is able to recognise the bodies that have only now been extracted in order to issue death certificates.

And as if it couldn't get worse, there is a third problem of finding burial cloth, which at this point is considered to be a luxury.

The shops that sell burial supplies in nearby cities have exhausted their stocks of fabrics. Appeals appeared on social media groups to donate any material that could be used to wrap the body. 

The municipality's funeral vehicles cannot reach all the city's neighbourhoods, as many roads are blocked with rubble. They lined up on the entrances to alleys waiting for the bodies to be carried to them.

The bodies are then transported on top of each other to agricultural land surrounding the city — which has been donated by farmers or municipalities to use as makeshift cemeteries.

On the road to Reyhanli (40 km east of Antakya), gravediggers busied themselves with heavy machinery to prepare the graves for the early morning hours. 

Longitudinal holes almost two meters deep were dug, where the bodies were thrown. The 'graves' were only marked with numbered wooden sticks extracted from the rubble, wood workshops, or fruit boxes.  

AFP

Forensic teams worked to collect evidence from each corpse and DNA samples that might be used later to recognise the bodies. 

Meanwhile, the proper mechanism to register the deaths or claim the bodies later is unknown. We could not talk to the police officers either. 

The elevated asphalt road, which overlooks the plain, was crowded with ambulances, funeral vehicles, and citizens' cars loaded with bodies looking for a grave, even temporary.

Someone asked for our help, and Muhammed apologised politely before even fielding the request. 

"I cannot transport anymore bodies by car," he said. 

"I've done enough. I will not do it again."

Despite the jam-packed crowd, the silence was terrible. Some curious people watched from where we were standing, snapping pictures away from the eyes of the police, which prevented filming. 

In the crowd, some cried; others muttered a prayer. We learned later of other cemeteries where clerics prayed for the dead before burial. As for where we were, no one prayed over their graves *.

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*    "No One Prayed Over Their Graves," a novel by the Syrian novelist Dar Nofal, 2019