A week after the deadly earthquake it would have been Sercan’s third birthday. The little boy, who loved horses and Mickey Mouse, was due to celebrate with his parents at their apartment in the upmarket Renaissance building in Antakya. None of them knew when they went to bed one Sunday night that Sercan would never see his third birthday, even amid mounting questions about the safety of their building in a febrile earthquake zone.
When the first of two deadly quakes struck shortly after 4am the next morning, the Renaissance and its 249 flats became a mass grave. The building ripped clear from its foundations before all 12 storeys tipped forward and the block collapsed on to its face. The Koşar family – young Sercan, his mother, Selcan, and father, Serkan – were entombed in the rubble. Their bodies were so badly burned that their family in the nearby town of Ekinci are still awaiting the results of a DNA test to confirm their identities before they can organise a funeral.
Serkan’s brother Ata, who lived in Ekinci, just across the highway, was woken by the violent tremors. He had opted to stay in the two-floor family home there, fearing an earthquake as violent as the 7.8 magnitude quake that destroyed swaths of southern Turkey and northern Syria.
He immediately rushed to the Renaissance. “On the way, I started to realise that the roads were blocked in some places by collapsed buildings. I started to realise how strong the earthquake was, and I had to find a way to get here,” he said, standing in the olive grove that once wrapped around the base of the Renaissance, where families had camped out for more than a week waiting for rescue workers to pull out bodies from the rubble.
When Ata arrived, he tried to comb through the rubble of the mammoth apartment complex to find Serkan and his family, surrounded by anguished screams from relatives searching for their loved ones in the dust and concrete of a building that once advertised itself as safe.
“Every step I took I heard people crying out for help. But the Renaissance was almost 250 apartments, and I couldn’t tell how to locate his floor, so I couldn’t see where I should call out to see if he was still alive or not, if he needed my help. The whole thing had completely collapsed and I couldn’t enter. I stayed here until 8am that day, but nobody came,” he said.
The Renaissance, according to what one former resident wrote in its guestbook, was supposed to be a “corner of heaven”. A luxury block built in 2013 on the outskirts of the city of Antakya, in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, it included flats that sold for up to £132,000, far more expensive than anything else in the area.
It had its own swimming pool, cafes and sports grounds and its occupants were Hatay’s cosmopolitan middle class: a physics professor, professional athletes, a luxury building contractor. Serkan and Selcan had just started their own business importing spices and making sauces according to local Hatay recipes, that had begun to take off even in a troubled domestic economy.
The total destruction of the Renaissance quickly came to embody the tension between the Turkish authorities and the public. The earthquake led to the collapse of thousands of buildings across the south of the country, with 84,726 found to have been destroyed or severely damaged, according to the environment and urban planning minister, Murat Kurum. While the state has blamed corruption among individual developers and building contractors, furious relatives of the more than 36,000 dead in Turkey, like those who gathered outside the Renaissance for over a week, say a broader system enabled the corrupt building practices that caused the luxury apartment block to fall.
Less than a week after the Renaissance’s collapse, its developer, Mehmet Yaşar Coşkun, was arrested in Istanbul airport, accused of trying to flee. At least 110 other building contractors and developers were arrested in Turkey, some accused of “reckless manslaughter and building code violations”.
Coşkun told prosecutors in his statement that he did not know why the Renaissance had collapsed, and that he had followed all required regulations during construction. “There were no problems during its two-year construction, which was finished without incident. The building was in use for 10 years, and there were no problems during this time,” he said.
Callout
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who swept to power in 2003 promising a nationwide construction boom to rebuild the country after the deadly earthquake of 1999, which killed more than 17,000 people, has rebuffed suggestions of institutional corruption in Turkey’s construction sector. One month before local elections in March 2019, his government instituted a nationwide building amnesty on illegal construction, including contractors that added unregistered additional floors to buildings despite local architects and engineers flagging safety concerns.
“Ninety-eight percent of the collapsed buildings were built before 1999,” Erdoğan declared. He promised swift reconstruction would begin less than a month after the quake.
Former Renaissance residents, however, said they had sounded the alarm that the building was unsafe long before the quake. “I told the building manager that I was scared, that the foundations of the buildings were slipping – he laughed at me,” Zekiye Barutçu Yiğitbaşı told Demirören news agency, adding she had moved out after seeing a large crack on one wall in her hallway and deciding the building was unsafe.
“I warned them for days, and afterwards the same building manager told me it was sorted out. When I asked how they rectified the problem he told me that engineers had assessed the building. I told this to my neighbours but they didn’t care,” she said.
“This corner of heaven became a corner of hell.”
A thousand people were estimated to be inside the building at the time of its collapse. On an apocalyptically empty street more than a week later, soldiers in blue berets patrolled in formation as families stood guard, ready to show pictures of their loved ones to the emergency workers in the hope of identifying their crushed and charred bodies.
Corpses pulled from the rubble without a relative present to identify them risked being buried quickly owing to their decomposing state, forcing the families to have the bodies exhumed in order to identify them. Other families expressed relief they were able to find their loved ones’ intact corpses rather than dismembered pieces of their bodies, making them easier to identify.
Like many of those living there, the Koşar family chose to move into the Renaissance because they believed it was safe. “This building was advertised as one of the strongest in Antakya, which is why the people living here were from a certain economic and social class,” said Serkan’s brother, Ata. “They chose it for its safety, it was the most expensive building in the area.”
Serkan invited their father, a retired building contractor, to inspect the apartment when he and Selcan moved in a year and a half ago. “My father told him it’s dangerous and you shouldn’t move in here. But my brother didn’t listen,” said Ata his voice breaking. “He told him it’s a safe building, it has a Japanese anti-shock system to make it earthquake-proof in the foundations.”
He pointed to the chipped pastel tower blocks that dotted the area around İnönü boulevard, where the Renaissance had stood, close to a little cluster of cafes and businesses. “Look, none of those apartment blocks collapsed, just the Renaissance,” he said.
Other families who gathered in front of the vast concrete skeleton of the Renaissance said that Coşkun’s arrest was insufficient.
“The process does not end with catching the contractor. We caught the contractor, we punished him. But who gave that contractor the authority? Those who give the approvals for this construction, they need to be followed and caught,” said İlyas Çetin, warming himself around a log fire with his two brothers. They were camping outside the Renaissance in an effort to find the corpse of their fourth brother, Cevdet, who had moved to the block temporarily while he took a job in the area.
Their brother İbrahim sombrely agreed. “This is about more than the contractor. Who poured this cement, who prepared and brought it here? They must be found. Who are the certificate issuers for these buildings? They must also be found. It doesn’t just end with the contractor. This needs to be investigated,” he said.
Coşkun served two terms as the head of Hatay’s chamber of architects, a leading union position that saw him lauded for his standing in the local community. After the Renaissance’s collapse, Hatay’s longtime mayor, Lütfü Savaş, said it was “unscrupulous”, to direct questions about who licensed its construction to his office, and instead blamed the Ekinci municipality, where the apartment block stood.
“There is a chain of responsibility in the construction process, including those in local and central government,” said Eyüp Muhcu, general secretary of Turkey’s Chamber of Architects. “People are being used as scapegoats so that those who are responsible are not held accountable. The duties of everyone involved in the construction of a building should be examined and legally assessed.”
But families such as the Koşars or the Çetins, gathered at the foot of the scarred luxury apartment block, said that arresting one contractor would do little to assuage their grief. “I’m waiting here for my brother right now,” said İlyas. “I can give the contractor 100,000 lira [£4,438]. Could he bring my brother back? I’m willing to pay, no punishment for him even. Give me my brother back.”
