New York Review of Books | 03/09/2025
On February 3, 2023, the lawyers Halil Aktoprak, Celal Dikme, and Hüseyin Fırat sat down for dinner at the fifth-floor canteen of the provincial courthouse in Adıyaman, a small city in southeast Turkey. Like many people in Adıyaman, the three were distant cousins, though clearly not cut from the same cloth. Halil had rounded features and a mellow presence. Hüseyin was tall, with a long face and a gentlemanly poise. Celal, stocky and slightly older, was the playful one. A long window framed the eastern skyline behind them: blue mountains flanked the valley, where commercial and residential buildings were spread out among modest houses, tobacco fields, and vegetable patches. After dinner, they had tea at Halil and Hüseyin’s office across the street, then went home. Three days later the skyline, the office, and Halil were gone.
The 7.7- and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes that rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria that day were unprecedentedly destructive. As of the latest official announcement this February, 53,737 people have perished in the disaster in Turkey; 8,387 of those were in Adıyaman, one of the hardest-hit provinces. That number doesn’t include people who died later from injuries or diseases, who lacked residency papers, whose death certificates were unclaimed, or whose bodies were never found. The interior ministry last declared seventy-five people missing.
According to the urbanization ministry, 56,256 buildings collapsed and 200,401 were severely damaged. But architects who monitored the process say the evaluations were done hastily and crudely. They suspect that the level of damage was underplayed, since many landlords and developers contested the results—some, they heard, even bribed inspectors—so as to attract new renters or deter tenants from suing them.
Even before the rubble cleared, public debate about the actual death toll began. The You-Tuber journalist Fatih Altaylı estimated, based on the number of people in the earthquake zone who had stopped using credit cards, that 183,000 had perished—a number that was widely cited. A month in, when the official toll had just passed 45,000, doctors, engineers and opposition politicians told reporters it had to be three, four, five times higher.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 