The Flower That Bloomed in the Rubble

Three days ago was the anniversary of the August 17 earthquake.

A full quarter of a century has passed since then.

But it is as vivid in my memory as if it were yesterday.

In the earthquake that struck southeastern Turkey last year, the Serap Apartment building in Kahramanmaraş was also destroyed.

There was a nut shop underneath it. Four months later, the sunflower seeds left among the ruins first sprouted, then grew tall and bloomed.

One way or another, life was going on. Every living thing, no matter how dire the conditions, inevitably finds a way to survive.

When I saw the photo of that news story, I was reminded of the beautiful Çiçek in Adapazarı, which was almost completely destroyed in 1999.

I had been caught in the earthquake while in Ankara.

The fifth floor of the apartment building where I lived on Güleryüz Street in Ayrancı had swayed like a cradle.

After trying to understand what was happening for about 15-20 minutes and confirming that everyone, children and adults alike, was safe, I left the house to go to the Ankara Bureau of Akşam Newspaper, where I was working at the time, located on Bestekar Street. I went down through Elçi Street to Güvenlik Avenue, and from there to Atatürk Boulevard.

The lights in the houses were on all along the way.

People had gathered in clusters in front of their apartment buildings.

The sounds of car alarms were coming from all directions.

Women and children had rushed out into the street in their pajamas just as they had gotten out of bed; those who had cars took shelter inside them, while those who didn't were waiting in the middle of the street with blankets on their backs, not knowing what to do.

There was nowhere to get news.

It was also the early, amateur days of the news channels that were just beginning to flourish. At that hour of the night, they were airing taped broadcasts. It was clear they were unprepared for such a situation. On TRT, there were reruns of the previous day's broadcasts.

I turned on the car radio. After some night music, selections from the classics, and so on, I stumbled upon one of the local radio stations in Ankara.

It was live on air.

I knew the girl who was the program host; she was both my neighbor and my friend from my student days. Her family lived in İzmit. With a trembling voice, she said there had been a major earthquake and that she wanted to call her family, but all lines toward Istanbul were down.

Lightning struck in my mind at that moment. The earthquake had occurred in the Marmara Region. I grabbed my cell phone and called my mother and father, who spend their summers in the town of Kurşunlu on the coast of the Gemlik Gulf in Bursa.

The cell phone call didn't go through.

Then I thought of the landline. I dialed, and it was answered on the very first ring. Before I even had a chance to ask, my father said in an excited voice, "Are you okay? We are fine, don't worry, my son."

I felt relieved.

I was trying to understand what had happened.

"The earth and sky became one," he began to explain. At the first tremor, they had jumped out of bed and quickly thrown themselves outside. When they got to the garden, the earthquake was still continuing. At that moment, my father noticed something strange in the sea, illuminated by the moonlight. The sea had risen by three or four meters, a giant wave had hit the shore, and a light had risen from within the sea toward the sky.

I was horrified by every sentence my father spoke. What he was saying sounded like a script for a horror movie about the end of the world.

"Dad," I said, "No matter what, do not go into the house, spend the night in the car."

While he was saying, "Okay, don't worry about us," the landline was cut off.

When I arrived at the newspaper, News Manager Ahmet Baydar was trying to park his car, a Fiat 126 BIS, which was smaller than himself.

He hadn't been able to get news from anywhere either.

The Marmara Region was facing a disaster, but no one knew exactly what had happened.

I told him what my father had said. He listened carefully and said, "The best thing is to set off toward Istanbul and see for ourselves." The newspaper's headquarters in Istanbul could not be reached either.

Within half an hour, we set off in one of our vehicles.

The disaster showed its face when we reached Bolu. The Ankara-Istanbul Highway had literally been torn to pieces. Large sinkholes had formed; the smooth asphalt had been torn like paper in places, some cars had fallen into these sinkholes, and others had rolled into the ditches.

The road was blocked. I went over to a car that had crashed into the guardrails.

Inside was a non-commissioned officer returning from leave to his unit in Gölcük, along with his family. They were in shock. I said something like "get well soon," but they weren't even listening to me.

The officer's wife could only say, "The road threw us here like a toy car on a shaken rug." Indeed, they should have been on the other side of the road, but their car had crossed over to the Ankara direction.

I spoke to a few more people.

It was impossible to continue toward Istanbul.

There was no one coming from the opposite direction either. We had to turn back.

At that moment, I asked a villager who was trying to attach his tractor trailer on the edge of his field what had happened.

His eyes were wide with shock. "Look," he said, "The field split in two like a garden plot. My neighbor's foal fell into it."

I thought he was joking, but when day broke and I saw the massive fissures along the roadside, I realized he was serious.

Ankara was just waking up.

No one, including Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, had any idea about the scale of the disaster. In front of the Prime Ministry, a DSP minister was complaining to another that they needed to install powerful radio centers in all major cities, otherwise, if someone were to take the city away, they wouldn't even know about it.

The connection between Turkey's capital and its largest city, Istanbul, had been severed.

The state was literally paralyzed. It wasn't just the state; it turned out that the grand GSM operators, who until that day had acted as if they were untouchable, had no preparations whatsoever.

In short, over the following two days, we realized that the dimensions of the disaster were far greater than we had thought. Turkey had experienced one of the greatest earthquakes in its history; the country had been struck at its very heart. The loss of life was immense. Adapazarı, İzmit, Gölcük, and Yalova had been razed to the ground. Istanbul had been forced to face its greatest fear.

Two days later, we set off again. This time, we were using the state highway, not the motorway.

When we arrived in Adapazarı, I couldn't believe my eyes. It had become a ghost town. There was almost no house left standing intact on the streets or avenues. People were running back and forth, trying to reach the bodies of their mothers, fathers, children, and spouses from among the ruins.

When someone's scream of "there's someone alive!" was heard, everyone would head there, putting all their strength into the work to pull the person out from under the rubble.

There was a thick smell of dust and corpses in the air. They were quickly placing the lifeless bodies into mass graves they had dug, throwing a bit of lime over them, and burying them.

The Turkish soldiers, whom Tayyip did not send to the field during the Hatay earthquake, were working their fingers to the bone; AKUT volunteers, Zonguldak miners, firefighters who came to help from surrounding provinces, and construction machinery were working like bees.

Every living person pulled from under the rubble, whether known or unknown, created an incredible wind of joy.

But every passing minute took hopes along with it.

More than 72 hours had passed since the earthquake. In one of the streets, two young volunteers caught my attention. They were listening on the rubble with a device in their hands, and someone who looked like they were about to collapse from exhaustion was watching them with eyes turned bloodshot from crying.

I went up to him.

"My condolences," I said. "Do you have a relative under the rubble?"

"My mother, my father, and my daughter are there," he said.

They hadn't been able to pull his wife out alive.

Just then, we jumped up at the cry of "there's someone alive!" from one of the young men listening. Everyone in the vicinity started running toward the rubble.

Who was the living person underneath? Was it the mother, the father, or the daughter? Because the young men listening had said they only heard the voice of one person.

I didn't know what to think at that moment.

Construction machinery arrived, then AKUT and other volunteers. They began to remove the rubble with extreme care.

Time just wouldn't pass. Seconds and minutes had become like a century.

Then, they reached the lifeless body of her mother first, then her father. It was clear they had lost their lives the moment the earthquake struck.

They quickly wrapped them in blankets and placed them on the side of the road.

Then the never-ending minutes began.

The sound coming from below had stopped. While the girl's voice could be heard until half an hour ago, now there was a deathly silence over the rubble.

Then, a gap first opened among the ruins. Then the construction machine moved a large column, and the gap grew a little larger.

As the rescue teams were preparing to enter, a hand reached out from inside the hole that had just been opened.

It was like a dream.

A beautiful young girl emerged as if gliding through the piles of concrete, stood up on her feet, and started to walk.

It was as if time had stopped.

After the initial shock was overcome, an ambulance arrived, and with doctors, nurses, and so on, tears of joy mixed with shouts of happiness. Everyone, known or unknown, was hugging each other.

Her father had collapsed onto the stretcher they were trying to put her on, kissing and smelling his daughter through his tears.

The scene was unbelievable.

They quickly started an IV and performed her first examination.

Not only was she conscious, but despite having been under the rubble for more than 72 hours, she was extremely healthy. During the earthquake, she had been trapped between the refrigerator in the house and the door frame, and she had managed to hold onto life for the three days that passed with the water and food in the refrigerator.

She had spent her time sleeping, and when she woke up, she had waited to be rescued by hearing the sounds coming from outside.

I slipped through the crowd around her and went to the side of the stretcher. I leaned over slightly and asked her name.

She looked at me with a smile.

"Çiçek," she said.

The rubble had bloomed into a flower.

I stayed in the earthquake zone for about 15 days. I never forgot what I saw and what I experienced. The smell of rotting corpses didn't leave my nose for months. The crushed, mangled, lifeless bodies of people entered my dreams for a very long time. I always woke up at night with a start.

I thought such a great trauma could not be overcome easily.

But that's not what happened. With the February 6 earthquake, we understood that no one had learned any lessons from the great disaster of 1999.

The same negligence, the same mistakes; contractors who disregard human life with an endless greed for profit and wealth, governments that pretend to take precautions but turn a blind eye when they find an easy way out...

We can never seem to go beyond the pathetic memorial ceremonies we hold every August 17. Because of "rent-based transformation" instead of "urban transformation," the earthquake danger continues to stand before us as a near and clear threat.

Unfortunately, the people of my country are not aware that the votes they cast, saying that a zoning amnesty has been issued, are their own death warrants.

Let us put a period to our article by saying that as long as reason and science do not prevail and we continue to see the earthquake as "fate," it is inevitable that we will experience these pains over and over again.