Recent wildfires have torn through southeastern Turkiye’s Hatay, still recovering from a February 2023 earthquake.
Antakya, Turkiye – The darkening sky and thick, acrid smoke carried by scorching winds filled residents of Turkiye’s Hatay province with dread.
“It was like waking up, but you’re back in a nightmare,” said Hatice Nur Yilmaz, 23, her voice trembling on the phone as she described seeing flames from her container home in Antakya, Hatay’s largest city.
Yilmaz studies at Osmangazi University, in northwest Turkiye’s Eskisehir, almost 400 miles (643 kilometres) away from Antakya.
But she was back in her family’s temporary home – Antakya is still rebuilding following the earthquake – when the fires broke out in Hatay. And, despite the home being untouched this time, it brought back some of the scars of the past.
“We looked at the sky … confused at first. Smoke billowed from the mountains. The wind picked up and the flames kept rising,” Yilmaz recounted, describing “the same panic, the same suffocating fear”.
Turkiye has been battling wildfires since the end of June, but a particularly bad outbreak at the start of July has killed at least three people and displaced more than 50,000 others.
Hatay, in southeastern Turkiye, has been particularly badly hit, stirring painful memories for survivors of the earthquake that devastated this region two and a half years ago.
On February 6, 2023, Yilmaz had been fast asleep in her family’s now-destroyed home when the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near dawn.
The quake and powerful subsequent tremors killed more than 53,000 people in Turkiye and destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of buildings across the country’s south and southeast, including the family’s home. About 6,000 people are also believed to have died in neighbouring northern Syria.
More than two years after the quakes, Yilmaz’s family is among nearly half a million people still displaced, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
“As soon as I saw the news [of the fires], I called my uncle’s wife because their house was very close to the fires,” Yilmaz said.
“She was weeping. She said, ‘We’re gathering what we can, they’re telling us to flee.’”
Yilmaz’s uncle had moved to Gulderen, on the outskirts of Antakya, to get away from the city centre of Antakya, where reconstruction work is continuing.
The fires consumed fragile threads of normalcy that survivors had painstakingly rebuilt. “Gardens with fruit trees, vegetables, all burned … but thankfully not their houses”.
“A neighbour’s haystack was gone. Animals trapped, perished,” Yilmaz relayed from her call with her relatives.
Chaotic self-reliance
The wildfires are believed to have been caused by a combination of factors – including human activity and suspected arson – coupled with high summer temperatures in the mid-30 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) and dry conditions.
As flames first engulfed the hillsides, residents reported taking immediate action with improvised methods.
Neighbours formed bucket brigades using well water and garden hoses, while others scrambled for generators to power pumps due to electricity cuts.
For Ethem Askar, 42, a steel contractor from Antakya’s neighbourhood of Serinyol who was involved in volunteer initiatives during both catastrophes, the parallels in disaster response are inescapable.
“Just as it was late in the earthquake, it was the same in the fire,” he stated bluntly, adding that during one of the fires, it took hours for the emergency services to send enough helicopters to put out the blaze.
“If there had been a proper first intervention, this scale of devastation wouldn’t have happened,” Askar said.
To compensate, Askar and other residents attempted to help out.
“Our group, about 45 volunteers – the same ones who did debris removal, food distribution, teaching children after the quake – we mobilised again,” Askar said.
“The initial response is minimal, then, when it’s almost too late, more resources arrive. By the next day, the fire was massive.”
He described frantic evacuations, a grim replay of digging through rubble.
Firefighters were able to evacuate residents and their animals from highland villages and relocate people to student dormitories and animals to other stables, but the villages sustained significant damage.
But Ilyas Yildirim, the chief of Hatay Metropolitan Municipality’s fire department, denied any delay in the firefighters’ response.
“There was no delayed response to the fire. Our initial response teams were already positioned in Hatay and intervened immediately,” Yildirim said.
“While additional units deployed to address simultaneous outbreaks at four locations, this operation differs fundamentally from earthquake response protocols,” he added.
“No operational delays occurred during the latest fire incidents.”
Echoes of an earthquake
Like Askar, Yilmaz has also felt as if her family and neighbours have had to rely on themselves to deal with the wildfires – a sentiment similar to that felt during the earthquake.
“There was no electricity … My two uncles … tried with their neighbours to beat back the flames with buckets and hoses, utterly alone,” she said.
News of fires breaking out elsewhere in Dortyol being partially extinguished, then flaring again, has become unbearable for Yilmaz. Fires started in Antakya on June 30 and reached Dortyol by July 4.
“It’s overwhelming now, staying here. Returning to this city … it feels shrouded in perpetual dust, a city of ghosts,” Yilmaz said.
Hatay Governor Mustafa Masatlı said on Monday that 920 households and 1,870 citizens had been evacuated from nine plateaux. Damage assessments continue.
While the fires in Antakya and Dortyol have largely been contained, flare-ups continue in other areas, according to department chief Yıldırım. New outbreaks have been reported in places like Samandag and Serinyol, just southwest and northeast of Hatay, respectively.
These flare-ups are keeping the firefighters and rescuers on their toes and draining their energy.
Across the Dortyol and Antakya regions of Hatay, about 6,500 people were evacuated as a precautionary measure, Hatay Fire Department’s Sergeant Deniz Nur said.
“The psychological toll of continuous instability is immense,” Askar, the volunteer, explained.
“People wake up every single day with the fear that something else will happen,” he said. “Even if they get new housing – and many are still in containers, like my parents were for months – the underlying anxiety doesn’t vanish.
“How can you feel normal? I knew a nurse who lived in her car for three and a half months after the quake. Building roads and apartments doesn’t erase these experiences. The trauma is embedded,” he said.
“All of us need serious psychological help even after two years,” Askar added. “I haven’t even started processing it myself. There is no time to cry, to grieve properly … We postponed it. We just keep doing what we can.”
Life amid the rubble
Once known for its rich multicultural heritage blending Turkish, Arab and Christian influences, evident in its architecture, cuisine and festivals, vast swaths of Hatay, known historically as Antioch, remain defined by mountains of rubble.
Yilmaz, the student, recalled better times in her large two-storey former family home, when summers meant meeting childhood friends home from university in cafes along bustling Kurtulus Street, now in ruins.
Her parents now live in a 21-square-metre (226-square-foot) container comprising one room and a combined kitchen-living area that they keep tidy, folding clothes into storage boxes to make the most of space.
In the summers and during holidays, when she and her three siblings return to Antakya from their universities, the whole family spreads mats out on the floor to sleep.
“The biggest problem is the lack of private space,” she explained. “I used to have my own room that overlooked the mountains … and we would have lots of guests.”
Now, gatherings still happen, but people sit on plastic chairs set up outside the containers, playing cards.
“I long to go out, to travel, to simply breathe as a human being. But the old places I knew are gone, demolished,” Yilmaz said.
“Are there new ones? Where? And even if I knew where, how could I get there? Transportation is just one barrier. These problems are piling up, becoming unbearably heavy,” she added.
Yet, amid compounded devastation, an unbreakable bond with Hatay persists.
Askar moved to a new house only six months ago after living for nearly two years in a container with his wife, 10-year-old son and his parents.
“All my memories, my life, my childhood, my friends, they are here,” he said.
“People from Hatay cannot live or breathe properly anywhere else. After the quake, I took my father away for three months,” Askar added. “When he returned, he vowed never to leave again, even if he had to live in a container forever. This land is in our blood.”
This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.
