Two years after his account of the earthquake, a Turkish writer lives its events

Two years ago, the Turkish writer Furkan Qaradri, who resides in the city of Malatya, published the novel “Yerle Yeksan” or “The Wreck” in February 2021, in which he tells the story of people who lived during the earthquake that struck the city of Elazig in 2020, and he did not know that what he wrote would live through it himself during an earthquake. February 2023 that shook his city.

“I witnessed the moments of search and rescue in the wreckage when the Elazig earthquake happened 3 years ago, and I was moved and thought about what I can do as a civil engineer and writer, and I decided to write a book and title it “The Wreck”, and after 2 years of publishing the book, I was a victim of an earthquake. in Malatya”.
Malatya was subjected to an earthquake at the end of February, following the great February 6 earthquake, which had its epicenter in Kahramanmaraş, and the Malatya earthquake resulted in the death of two people and the destruction of several homes, while the February 6 earthquake claimed the lives of 51,000 people in Turkey and Syria, which is the most severe in the history of earthquakes in the country since a year 1939 at least.

live experience

The Turkish writer was injured in the earthquake after the chandeliers fell on his neck on the 12th floor of a 13-storey building. However, after he somehow got out of the building he immediately joined the search and rescue effort “because the earthquake was severe.”

“It was a time when we witnessed moments that I will never forget in our lives. In the first moment of the earthquake, you have to keep calm, because you have to save as many people as possible from the rubble, but after this passes, the person experiences a trauma and they try to deal with it for the rest of their lives.”
consequences of the earthquake

In the latest statistics, the World Bank monitored that the earthquake and its aftershocks in Turkey caused direct material damage of $34.2 billion, but the total costs of reconstruction and recovery could be double that.

In press statements by Humberto Lopez, Director of the World Bank’s Turkey office, Turkey’s expected GDP will decline by at least half a percentage point this year, between 3.5% and 4%.

In addition, 1.25 million people have been made homeless, and 11 provinces in southern Turkey have been affected, some of the highest poverty rates in the country. It also hosts more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees, or about half of the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey.