In the Turkish town of Pazardik, a soccer field has been turned into a cemetery area to bury people killed in the earthquake that hit the area 11 days ago. The goalposts are still there, but the field is filled with about a hundred dirt mounds and trenches.
The wooden boards above all the newly excavated graves indicate the same date of death, February 6, 2023, the day the town was rocked by the deadliest earthquake in Turkey’s modern history..
Hussein Aqis, who was burying the daughter of one of his brothers with her husband and two sons, said, “We waited… ten days to get the dead bodies out from under the rubble.”“.
The plank on one of the adjacent graves was wrapped in a red scarf, while other graves were strewn with pine branches..
The scene in Pazardzhik, which was at the epicenter of the earthquake that occurred on the night of February 6, gives a glimpse of the suffering faced by those trying to find and bury their dead since the disaster that claimed the lives of more than 43,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria.
