The mother wept next to the wooden slat that marked the place where her son was buried, in a mound of earth that also contained dozens of other bodies killed in the earthquake in Turkey.
In a shortened form of customary funeral rites, the body had been purified as required by Islamic tradition, wrapped in a white shroud and laid in the earth, giving the mother, Gullu Kolac, a moment of dignity and final farewell during a week of mounting tragedies. .
Around her in the cemetery were many more new mounds as far as the eye could see, containing hundreds of graves. Mechanical excavators were digging new trenches nearby. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook southern Turkey on Monday (6) killed so many people in such a short time that it overwhelmed funeral services, speeding up the process by which families say goodbye to their dead.
Rituals in which relatives wash the body of the deceased and wrap it in a shroud, perform a ceremony and receive relatives and friends who come to offer their condolences have been left aside. The new process imposed by the crisis aims to honor the dead and bury them quickly, in the name of customs and public health.
The tragedy transformed the cemetery in the village of Kapicam, close to the quake’s epicenter. In normal times, it would be a serene place, surrounded by forest, shaded by majestic pines and with a distant panorama of snow-capped mountains.
But on Thursday (9), three days after the earthquake, the cemetery was crowded with bereaved families and bodies wrapped in blankets or sealed in body bags.
Most of the bodies arrived in trucks, ambulances or funeral home vehicles, after being pulled from the rubble of buildings destroyed by the earthquake. They were spread out on the floor, sometimes in groups of 12 or more, waiting for relatives to come claim them or to receive the final preparations for the burial.
A line of men crossed the cemetery back and forth carrying body bags from the tents where the corpses were being prepared to the pits where they would be buried.
Adnan Beyhan, a religious official who had come from a distant city to help with the earthquake response, said that due to the crisis conditions, Muslim funeral rites were having to be adapted.
Many of the bodies arriving had been disfigured by debris or had begun to decompose, he explained. Therefore, they could not be stripped and washed in water before being wrapped in shrouds, as is done under normal circumstances.
For that reason, some were left in the clothes they were wearing, and the people preparing the bodies used an Islamic practice known in Turkish as “teyemmum”, which allows disaster victims to be “washed” with stones or earth rubbed gently over them. they. They are then wrapped in white cloths to be buried.
Beyhan said that not all families accept the practice. The day before, a man who had lost a relative asked if it is acceptable in Islam to bury people in this way. “I told him, ‘Of course they do. And they have the status of martyrs,'” seen in Islam as a boon. Beyhan said the man left relieved.
For many, waiting itself is suffering. According to Islamic tradition, the dead must be buried as soon as possible.
Cengizhan Ceyhan had gone to the cemetery to bury his sister, Saziye Ozer, and her daughter, Beliz, 10, dead under the rubble of a collapsed building. “If it was a car accident, we could be with them right away, wash them right away. But this way, you know they’re dead, but you have to wait. You still have hope, and that’s painful. You don’t want to accept that they’re dead. are dead.”
For Kolac, who came to bury his son, the trip to the cemetery was a stopover on a road full of tragedies. Three of his family members were buried under rubble: his son, Yakup Bulduk, 22, his other son’s wife and their 2-year-old son.
The funeral process is systematized, if a little chaotic. The bodies that arrive at the cemetery are checked in order to officially register the death and issue a death certificate. Most bodies are being identified, but the police take fingerprints of those who are not and in some cases take blood samples. The information is entered into a government system along with the person’s grave number so that relatives can find the person.
The bodies are handed over to teams working for the state’s religious bureau. These take them to tents – some for men, others for women – to prepare them for burial and wrap them in a white cloth. They are then placed in body bags and laid out on tables, where their family members pray for them, as they would normally do in a mosque.
After that, they are carried into the trenches and covered with earth by an earthmoving machine. Some families add small personal touches to the place by writing the person’s name on the slat with a pen, tying a scarf or placing flowers.
Two adjacent graves had pink stockings with white horses on them, as if they were two sisters, possibly twins.
Proximity to death also weighs on employees. A religious worker who helped purify the bodies said he and his colleagues were depressed after dealing with so many mutilated bodies. “But we take shelter in God,” he said, declining to give his name because he is not authorized to speak to journalists. “We try hard not to get discouraged, because what’s right there in front of us is something valuable – a human being.”
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