An Undertaker and his family move to a graveyard after their apartment was damaged by quakes.
Ali Dogru, an undertaker in the city of Iskenderun, was tasked with burying hundreds of victims of Turkey’s devastating earthquakes. He moved his wife and four sons to live in an old bus by the cemetery where he works.
More than 54,000 people were dead and millions were left homeless by the terrible earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria last month. After hundreds of thousands of structures fell and others became hazardous, survivors are seeking refuge in tents, shipping container dwellings, hotel resorts, university dorms, and even railway carriages.
Shortly after the first earthquake on February 6 occurred, Dogru relocated his family from their damaged apartment to the cemetery out of concern for their security. Since then, they have been residing in an abandoned bus.
The 46-year-old undertaker had spent more than six years working at the cemetery, interring about five bodies daily on average. He buried 12 people the first evening following the earthquake. He organized the burials of a total of 1,210 fatalities within 10 days following the earthquake as the number of bodies arriving everyday skyrocketed.
He claimed that although he could manage living in a cemetery, the large number of funerals that occurred so quickly had severely damaged his mental health.
Dogru, a former butcher, compared individuals taking their deceased relatives to cemeteries to people carrying lambs as sacrifices for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
“When I worked as a butcher, I used to see people carry lambs to be sacrificed. As I saw folks holding their partners and children, it affected me really hard,” he stated.
Dogru had to acquire large equipment to dig graves because there were so many burials to plan, and he also had to work with the several imams who traveled from all around Turkey to assist.
“I only wanted to labor day and night to complete this project. There were no mass graves, he added. “I didn’t want people coming and alleging that the bodies weren’t buried.
Dogru claimed that he prevented people from separating some parents and children who passed away together and buried them in the same grave. ‘Death could not remove this child from the mother or the father,’ I declared. “Why would you do that?
Dogru also assisted authorities in taking photographs of unidentified bodies, fingerprints, blood samples, and DNA samples. When blood tests had identified them, he later led families to the graves of their ancestors.
From: Aljazeera
