Turkey: The Buried and the Dead

1.

On February 3, 2023, the lawyers Halil Aktoprak, Celal Dikme, and Hüseyin Fırat sat down for dinner at the fifth-floor canteen of the provincial courthouse in Adıyaman, a small city in southeast Turkey. Like many people in Adıyaman, the three were distant cousins, though clearly not cut from the same cloth. Halil had rounded features and a mellow presence. Hüseyin was tall, with a long face and a gentlemanly poise. Celal, stocky and slightly older, was the playful one. A long window framed the eastern skyline behind them: blue mountains flanked the valley, where commercial and residential buildings were spread out among modest houses, tobacco fields, and vegetable patches. After dinner, they had tea at Halil and Hüseyin’s office across the street, then went home. Three days later the skyline, the office, and Halil were gone.

The 7.7- and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes that rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria that day were unprecedentedly destructive. As of the latest official announcement this February, 53,737 people have perished in the disaster in Turkey; 8,387 of those were in Adıyaman, one of the hardest-hit provinces. That number doesn’t include people who died later from injuries or diseases, who lacked residency papers, whose death certificates were unclaimed, or whose bodies were never found. The interior ministry last declared seventy-five people missing.¹ According to the urbanization ministry, 56,256 buildings collapsed and 200,401 were severely damaged. But architects who monitored the process say the evaluations were done hastily and crudely. They suspect that the level of damage was underplayed, since many landlords and developers contested the results—some, they heard, even bribed inspectors—so as to attract new renters or deter tenants from suing them.

Even before the rubble cleared, public debate about the actual death toll began. The You-Tuber journalist Fatih Altaylı estimated, based on the number of people in the earthquake zone who had stopped using credit cards, that 183,000 had perished—a number that was widely cited.² A month in, when the official toll had just passed 45,000, doctors, engineers and opposition politicians told reporters it had to be three, four, five times higher.

“It’s pure speculation,” Süleyman Soylu, then interior minister, yelled into a CNN Türk microphone as he surveyed another province, Hatay, from a helicopter in April. Peering at a trampled city below, he said the government was laboring hard to count the dead, gathering information from muhtars (village and neighborhood chiefs), district governors, public prosecutors, the health ministry, and the migration directorate. “Who would it benefit if we lowered the number? These are just rumors to cripple this process, to discredit it.”

By then the interior ministry and presidential office were publishing fewer and shorter updates to the toll, which the media mostly reprinted with light hedging. A few major columnists and talk show hosts, however, still insisted that the government was hiding the truth. In March Ahmet Akın, the blustering and very televised vice president of the main opposition party, the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), even submitted a parliamentary question about the actual number of unidentified victims.

This was not the first time that critics had accused Ankara of miscounting the dead. Human rights monitors and defenders claim that the military regularly inflates enemy casualty figures in its operations against the Kurdish Workers’ Party, that the interior ministry and migration directorate conceal how many immigrants die crossing its national borders, and that the health ministry miscategorized deaths caused by Covid-19. None of these accusations can be confirmed, partly because most of the victims perished in areas strictly controlled by the government. The earthquake, however, had millions of witnesses, many of whom buried their own dead.

But if the scale of the disaster made it more visible, it also made it harder to arrive at an accurate death toll. The destruction was too vast and the response too ad-hoc to allow for orderly burials: the few forensic experts and gravediggers who were assigned were overwhelmed and uncoordinated. Muslim rites dictate that a corpse be buried as soon as possible, a rule that was often respected before a body could be identified. Untrained digger operators may have also carried some bodies away. Entire families were wiped out, complicating the identification process. 

It is likely, then, that the government doesn’t know the full scale of what happened. But rather than denounce or even respond to its accusers, Ankara has been resoundingly quiet. The government’s message after the earthquake—like after many national tragedies—has been to move on. Instead of supporting survivors when they needed it most, it has restricted lines of legal recourse. The more authorities have evaded their demands for clarity, the more paranoia has sunk in, warping a reality that is already upside-down. These dynamics hang over their ongoing search for accountability, including the search for one grave: the resting place of Halil.

*

Halil came from Samsat, a village in Adıyaman province that lies on the banks of the Euphrates. Between 163 BCE and 72 AD it was the seat of the tiny Commagene kingdom, remembered today because King Antiochus I hauled limestone statues between ten and thirty feet tall of Greco-Persian gods onto the highest point of Mount Nemrut. To the west ruled the Greeks and Romans, to the north the Armenians and Anatolian beyliks, to the east the Parthians and Orontids, and to the south the Assyrians and Cilicians. The few available historical sources, mostly written by outsiders in the previous century, paint Adıyaman as a land of orphans, bandits, peasants, smugglers, trachoma patients, and blood feuders. 

Adıyaman remains a buffer zone between the Turkish heartland and Kurdish autonomists. Roughly three quarters of the province’s residents are Kurdish, many of them with mixed heritage, including with Turkmen, Zaza, Arab, Armenian, and Assyrian backgrounds. Most locals, however, identify first as Sunni or Alevi. Starting in the 1980s, Sufi sheikhs and aghas developed close ties with the Islamist parties in Ankara. When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan came to power in 2003, his Justice and Development Party (AKP) pampered their business lobbies and doled out jobs to their men in the bureaucracy, police force, hospitals, and schools. Their religious charities, foundations, and associations provided services where and when the state or secular NGOs couldn’t—such as after the earthquake.

When the state crisis desk drew up the initial official list of provinces to which they would send first responders, Adıyaman was not included. Volunteers who tried to reach there—mostly Kurds from across the country and groups from neighboring Urfa—stalled on busted streets and blocked-off roads. It wasn’t until the third day that professional rescuers and state authorities made it in to evaluate the damage. They found gashed mountains, a lake flooded after landslides, collapsed bridges, burst piping, bent railway track, and villagers and their livestock exposed to freezing winter. In the downtown area they could hear the howls of people trapped under the rubble and the chipping of household tools against concrete. The worst-hit counties in Turkey, according to aerial data later shared by NASA, suffered wreckage on an average of 21 percent of their surface; the highest were both in Adıyaman, at 70 and 71 percent.

I arrived in Adıyaman three months later, a week before the general elections. Battered buildings watched over darkened streets. Kids dug for copper in three-story mounds of rubble. Sparrows, caked in dust, dipped their wings into wastewater puddles.

Erdoğan was up for reelection and polls suggested that his support was sinking across the country. Some commentators argued that the earthquake-hit provinces—which, except for Hatay, adored the president—could emerge as “swing states.” But the population registers had not kept up with the recent deaths and displacement. The election board estimated that more than 1.6 million survivors had moved but not changed their addresses. The prominent lawyer Sefa Yılmaz and a few opposition politicians warned reporters that Erdoğan loyalists could steal such unclaimed votes—as well as those of the tens or hundreds of thousands of unregistered dead that they suspected were still on voter lists. 

I spoke with Bekir Gürbüz, Adıyaman co-chairman of the Kurdish-led Green Left Party (YSP), at its makeshift headquarters: a series of white portable offices around a razed dirt plot, decorated with purple and green party flags. He told me that his colleagues had cross-checked the voter lists for mistakes, but that the information they had access to was too spotty to be sure. A population ministry clerk he knew claimed that they had fallen behind on registering deaths because of orders from the top to focus on address changes. I later heard a similar story from a gendarme. 

I also met Hüseyin Buluş, the Adıyaman head of the CHP, in a converted coffeehouse that served as his party base. He said his team had started a parallel casualty count that rose faster than the official one, though most muhtars refused to share their numbers to avoid friction with authorities. The team eventually stopped a third of the way through the process to focus on campaigning.

When I went to see the muhtar of Altınşehir, one of Adıyaman’s largest neighborhoods, I found his sons chatting in a fog of cigarette smoke on the porch of his office, which he also uses for his real estate agency. (He was out preparing lahmacun for lunch.) They asked me why I was looking into the casualty count: “What do you care?” said the elder son, an off-duty police officer. “What does it matter if 5,000 people died here or 50,000?” Five thousand was roughly the toll for Adıyaman at that point. Even measured observers—doctors, journalists, morgue workers—would tell me that they suspected it was closer to fifty.

Oy ve Ötesi (Vote and Beyond), a nonpartisan group founded a decade ago by veterans of the Gezi Park protests, had signed up 110,00 volunteer election observers nationwide; Adıyaman reported one of the biggest hikes in new recruits. At the Chit-Chat Café, a middle-class hangout near the university, I observed the group’s regional head, Ali Bekdeşer, lead a training. In fact he spent much of the session calming down fears that the dead would show up to vote. He was right: on election day, Erdoğan won 2.5 million more votes than his CHP opponent without significant proof of ballot stuffing.³ It turned out he didn’t need to play with the numbers. But if the rumors were false, the anxiety behind them revealed something genuine. 

2.

On that first trip to Adıyaman, a volunteer at Oy ve Ötesi introduced me to a lawyer who was part of a group at the Bar Association that wanted to investigate the death toll. I took his number and, back in Istanbul, checked in a few times, but their plan was stagnating. I had heard in passing about Halil’s case, and when I mentioned it the lawyer passed me onto Celal. 

In February 2023 Halil was thirty-four. He lived with his parents and four sisters in a flat on the sixth floor of the Zümrüt (Emerald) apartment complex, which would turn into one of the busiest rescue sites on Atatürk Boulevard. Its two blocks fell within the first twenty seconds of the sixty-five-second earthquake; the building in which Halil’s family lived twisted, then collapsed onto the boulevard. Residents, I was later told by Hüseyin, had thought the complex was safe, since it was built by Zümrüt Construction, an elite developer known for its stucco façades. 

Nighty-eight percent of people in Turkey reside near a fault line. The urban ministry has periodically updated building codes in the aftermath of earthquakes, and after the 1999 Izmit quake, it brought them in line with international standards. Yet the ministry also outsourced building inspections to private auditing firms, gifting business to construction conglomerates. Soon everyone was looking the other way: developers and builders cut corners; municipal permit agencies, site managers, professional chambers, auditors, and even mayors signed off on projects they never saw. Adıyaman was no exception. Between 2001 and 2021, as members of the growing middle class informally constructed their own houses and high-rises, the building stock more than doubled. 

The scale of the collusion would become clear too late. In August 2023 the Adıyaman Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects determined that more than 80 percent of collapsed buildings had missing permits, including those pardoned for not getting one. Forty-three of the forty-four Zümrüt buildings in the province collapsed. At the Zümrüt complex alone, 114 people perished. So far 420 cases have been brought against contractors, builders, and technical personnel in Adıyaman, including Zümrüt Construction. (Last April police arrested the former CHP provincial head Burak Binzet, who oversaw the construction of the Zümrüt complex.) At another trial the prosecution revealed that, back in 2010, residents of a Zümrüt building across town had complained that it was slanting. The contractor collected reports from the chambers of mechanical, geological, and civil engineers that confirmed it followed code, then hung a banner down the building’s top three stories with the blown-up documents and the words: “Those who smeared us! I challenge you to prove it…” In 2023 thirty-seven tenants were crushed to death under the building.

Not all chief prosecutors in the earthquake-hit provinces have shared their numbers, but according to the last announcements, a few dozen local officials are facing trial for violating inspection regulations.⁴ This February Adıyaman’s chief prosecutor revealed that his office had opened thirty-two investigations against low-level public servants after petitioning higher authorities for permission.

*

For two weeks after the earthquake, body bags extracted from the Zümrüt complex were lined along the pavement by the gas station down the street. A rotating guard of relatives from the Aktoprak family would huddle by the wreckage, looking for the remains of their loved ones. On the fourth day a team of Czech search and rescuers found the corpses of Halil’s four sisters; on the fifth, a Taiwanese team pulled out his mother—alive—and his father’s body. Relatives drove the corpses to their family village’s morgue. Doctors at a hospital in Diyarbakır amputated his mother’s legs.

When the body bags stopped accumulating, Celal, Hüseyin, and Halil’s uncle Veysel went to the city morgue, where the prosecutor allowed them to click through photos of the dead. Over ten days, they saw hundreds or perhaps thousands of corpses in a back room of the Adıyaman public hospital, which smelled like an abattoir. Hüseyin couldn’t bear to see a dog bleed, but here he concentrated, looking for the smallest identifying detail on the victims’ faces.

They found nothing but did not give up. Celal phoned every hospital in the vicinity, but to no avail. Hüseyin asked the police to search the site of the Zümrüt complex, but they were too busy collecting evidence at other buildings. The police finally took action after he pleaded with the attorney general—and then the justice minister, who was visiting the Adıyaman courthouse—but only found Halil’s phone and a woman’s arm.

I came back to Adıyaman to meet Celal that July, and I would return twice more. When I wasn’t reporting or pacing the city’s shapeshifting streets, I chatted with locals: kids, university students, housewives, unemployed men, retirees; farmers, drivers, salesmen, secretaries, entrepreneurs; teachers, journalists, social workers, doctors, more lawyers; municipal workers, police, soldiers. I sat with them at workplaces, coffeehouses, cafés, cars, kebab houses; the stools outside bakeries in the old bazaar or strewn across dusty clearings; the bunkbeds in prefabricated steel homes; the living rooms of cracked apartments. I didn’t have to bring up the earthquake because they unfailingly did. All around the city, they sat for hours over tea and cigarettes, exchanging stories together of that night and the days after.

The tales were often fantastical. They featured visions and paranormal coincidences. A girl with a phobia of earthquakes, who had moved away years ago, mysteriously returned and fell victim; a patriarch’s ghost comforted his family as they waited for rescuers; a breakup, a honeymoon, and an unexpected visit were interrupted, condemning the lone survivor to forever relive that night. Stories were refashioned for any number of reasons: trauma, peer pressure, boredom; political allegiance and pragmatism; guilt and faith. A persuasive account could secure bigger aid packages, a university scholarship, more visitors: someone who lost a son or a mother got more sympathy than someone who lost a husband or fifty cousins. Their sheer quantity was dizzying. The dead were everywhere, an invisible horde, and it didn’t matter if the story was accurate or not, as long as the speaker willed it into being. 

When I asked Halil’s relatives about the days after the earthquake, their recollections were blurry: biblical rain, numbness, nameless volunteers. Halil’s mother was convalescing in her village and too deep in mourning to speak to me, but her brother-in-law Necmeddin told me her memory wasn’t straight. At first she said she was angry with Halil for leaving without coming to get her; then she said she never saw him at all; then she said he came running for her as the building toppled. 

Halil’s uncle Veysel started to see Halil in his dreams. “Come and get me, I’m waiting,” he would cry from under his home. To calm Veysel, Celal petitioned the police to dig at the basement of the Zümrüt site once again; they found nothing. Halil’s cousin Ibrahim had the same dream two months later: “I’m close, come find me!” Celal asked for one more dig. Again nothing. Necmeddin swore that he saw Halil in the flesh several months later, while prostrating at a mosque in Istanbul. 

It wasn’t just the family. Bedir Bakır, Halil’s close friend who ran an earthworks company nearby, was on watch when he thought he recognized Halil’s jaw on a crushed face in one of the body bags. But the time he fetched Necmeddin to double-check, another family had claimed the body. Bedir, who had been overseeing diggers, told me he regretted not looking for the scar on the corpse’s knee—a scar they happened to share. Hüseyin tracked down the relatives who had claimed the corpse. He’s definitely ours, they told him. 

*

“We’ve only just started living the earthquake,” Celal told me when we first met in person last July. We were at the Bar Association’s wing of the courtroom—his office, like Halil’s and Hüseyin’s, had been destroyed. In the absence of a paper trail, he had to create one in order to find the grave. He filed a missing person report with the police that triggered an official investigation. The authorities had other priorities, but he kept the pressure up, making multiple visits to their offices and submitting various applications to move the search forward. He requested that they prick DNA samples from Halil’s mother and from the seventy-seven unidentified bodies buried at all the cemeteries in Adıyaman. The tests came back negative, though they helped dozens of other families identify relatives.

After a few months without developments, sometime in June 2023, Hüseyin reluctantly decided to declare Halil dead—that way his mother could at least claim his inheritance. In 1983, after the mammoth Atatürk Dam flooded Samsat, Halil’s father had bought twelve hectares of land in the new village they had been relocated to, where he grew cotton, beets, corn, and grains. Harvest season was approaching. The Aktopraks needed to pay their sharecroppers. 

Hüseyin went to the population ministry to apply for a death certificate; the clerk said he first had to file a disappearance case with the prosecutor. So Hüseyin phoned the prosecutor, who sent him back to the population ministry. Now the clerk at the ministry said he couldn’t declare Halil presumed dead because Celal had reported him as missing. The clerk’s hands were tied. Things are topsy-turvy here, he told Hüseyin. The living are registered as dead and the dead as living.⁵ 

A few days after meeting Celal, I visited the provincial population ministry, which is nestled in an overbearing neo-Ottoman building that is identical to the governor’s complex next to it. I prepared myself for a hostile reception, having received one at the attorney general’s office. (The district and provincial governors, whom I met later, were also standoffish.) But the director’s aides were merely bored. They called in their boss, a little man with a sing-song voice. The civil service had been dispatching officials in and out of earthquake provinces every few months, so as to share the workload. He was one of the rare ones who asked to stay behind in Adıyaman.

The director told me that anyone who claimed the numbers were off was lying. The state paid a small compensation to victims’ families; no one wouldn’t collect their due. He couldn’t tell me the latest death toll, however, because he couldn’t access the numbers himself. A 2005 law had handed sole access to the data to the Turkish Statistical Institute, which only publishes mortality figures yearly. “It’s a strange system,” he said. “I’m the one who puts all the pieces together, but I don’t even know what image I’ve made.” 

3.

When I next visited that October, Celal looked brighter and better rested. He had identified, then ruled out, thirteen victims from Zümrüt apartment complex whose deformed corpses might have been confused with Halil’s, and was awaiting the lab results of the last two. The demolitions were picking up speed: gaps on Atatürk Boulevard had widened and traffic was thick with cement mixers and dump trucks transporting gnarled metal. Next to the courthouse, excavators and drilling rigs pounded at the ground to lay a sturdier foundation. The land under Halil’s office had sunk deep enough that the excavators inside were not visible from the surface. 

The Bakırlar Earthworks facilities were also buzzing. I visited the annex where Halil had sat with Bedir every evening, an adobe hut decorated with faded photos of tractors, where a semaver was always simmering with kaçak tea. The exact spot where Halil disappeared, just across a narrow way, was now enclosed by a ring of shipping containers: accommodation for migrant workers sent by the subcontracting company in Ankara. 

The lab results had not yet arrived when Celal began to pursue another avenue: the new public prosecutor, who was more obliging than the previous one, granted him wider access to legal records. On December 21, while skimming through a courthouse computer, Celal stumbled on a file of photographs, taken by a member of the medical staff on the third day after the earthquake, which showed Halil’s body, whole and clean. He felt strangely happy to see his dead friend. 

From the pictures, Celal noted that the staff at the public hospital had tagged Halil’s corpse as GHM-1 (Gözlem—Hüviyeti Meçhul, or Observation—Unidentified), meaning he was the first victim recorded without an identity. Unidentified cases are passed onto a prosecutor, who collects a DNA sample and writes up a report. But GHM-1 never seems to have reached that far, since Celal found no associated reports. Much later, GHM-1 made its way to the case file of another public prosecutor dealing with missing people, who never informed his colleagues about it. What puzzled Celal even more was that the photos had not appeared on the morgue’s computers. He phoned his friend from the forensics lab, now dispatched elsewhere, who remembered that the files there had grown so unwieldy that the staff stored a portion in an archive: that is, on three computers that they disconnected and set aside. 

Celal brought Halil’s cousin Ibrahim to the public hospital to identify the face in the photograph. The pair then gathered more relatives and headed to the central cemetery, where the morgue sends bodies, to find the grave and recite a prayer together. I had watched the cemetery transform from a dirt field that smelled faintly of dung, studded with Sharpied wooden posts and upright concrete blocks, into a grassy expanse with long rows of marble tombs overlooking bird houses and olive tree saplings and stalks of primrose, sage, and sunflower. Mourners had planted Turkish flags and draped graves with belongings of the deceased, like soccer jerseys and needle-lace scarfs.

Celal gave the cemeteries director the code and asked him to look up the matching grave site. But GHM-1 was not in the records. There was no official report, or DNA sample, or grave register. The director’s aide, who had stood silently next to his boss, sensed Celal’s despair and took him aside. “I was there,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Halil was mistakenly buried in someone else’s grave. The bodies were piling up; we couldn’t leave them out like that.”

So Celal returned to the courthouse to plot his next move. He would ask for the details of all the graves at the cemetery dated February 6; then filter the list by sex, age, and weight; then track their codes, check their photos, test their DNA. If he had to, he would apply to dig them up one by one to collect samples. Four thousand graves lay ahead. Who knows, I told Celal when I saw him last February, he might stumble on the six other people he knew were still missing in Adıyaman. (The governor had just told me that only one person remained unaccounted for.) But we both knew that no prosecutor would grant him permission to dig up what was resting. 

*

A year to the day of the earthquake, I dropped by one last time at the base of the Zümrüt blocks. The shipping containers were still parked there, and behind them lay tall heaps of steel wire extracted from nearby buildings. As I snapped photos, a woman approached me. She was ambling with her adult daughter, who had Down syndrome. 

“Did you live at the Zümrüt apartment complex?” she asked. No, I told her. I’m a journalist following the search for Halil Aktoprak. The woman, Emine, said she had lived in the block behind him. They had moved there around the same time as the Aktopraks, but didn’t know the family too well.

“I heard they found him in September when they dug up the site,” she said. “They drove him to his village and buried him there.” Her twin sister had heard this story from someone who had heard it from Ibrahim. I told her that last I knew the lawyer was still looking.

Then Emine outdid me. She called her sister to check. She called her sister’s source. She asked the migrant workers lounging in the shipping containers about Halil. When they directed her to the annex, she took me to the hut and asked the men inside if they had found him. As they confirmed my answer, she listened silently with a light smile, like Halil’s in his photos. Then she thanked the men politely and said she had to go. Her daughter couldn’t stay unattended for too long.