On Tuesday evening, the earthquake’s death toll had reached 39,106 – 35,418 in southern Turkey and 3,688 in Syria.
The UN said it expected these figures to rise considerably. “We are witnessing the worst natural disaster in the last century in the WHO Europe region and we are still measuring its scale,” said a World Health Organization official.
Meanwhile, new miraculous rescues were reported. In Turkey, emergency services pulled a woman out from under the rubble 222 hours (over 9 days) after the earthquake that devastated the region, reports Anadolu Agency.
Melike Imamoglu, 42, was pulled from the rubble in the Onikisubat district of Kahramanmaras province, the epicenter of the earthquakes that killed tens of thousands of people and collapsed thousands of buildings. She was taken over by medical teams, notes Anadolu, which also posted a short video clip of the woman’s rescue on Twitter.
In Adıyaman, a 77-year-old woman, Fatma Güngör, was rescued 212 hours after the first devastating earthquake, writes News.ro, citing dha.com.tr. The woman was found last night, under the ruins of a collapsed 7-story building.Initially, it was discovered that someone was alive there because sounds could be heard from under the rubble. Then a thermal imaging camera was used, after which a tunnel began to be dug towards the woman. During the rescue operations, those from the teams there tried to keep the injured woman talking, so that she would not lose consciousness.
The legendary Antioch destroyed by the quake
The earthquake of February 6 erased in two minutes fourteen centuries of history in Antakya, known as the cradle of civilizations in antiquity.
The Habib-i Neccar Mosque, considered to be the oldest in Turkey, is completely destroyed. The dome has completely collapsed and the prayer hall is now a pile of rubble. In fact, all the streets in the city of Antakya are blocked by the collapsed buildings, writes France24.
14 centuries of history were thus erased in less than two minutes in the city known for most of its history as Antioch.
Habib-i Neccar was built in 638 and is considered “the first mosque built within the borders of Turkey today”, according to the page of the Turkish Ministry of Culture. Only the outer walls survived from the historical monument.
“Part of the Prophet Muhammad’s beard was kept in a box” on display in the mosque, “but it is no longer there,” said Havva Pamukcu, a 50-year-old woman.
A few hundred meters further, the Greek Orthodox church built in the 14th century and rebuilt in 1870 after an earthquake was also destroyed. The white cross on the pointed roof of the building now emerges from a pile of stones and planks. “All the walls have collapsed. We are desperate,” said Sertac Paul Bozkurt, a member of the council that administers the church.
Antakya is in Hatay province and was one of the hardest hit by the earthquake and its aftershocks, which caused more than 35,000 deaths in the region. In the city, it is no longer possible to drive on streets blocked by collapsed buildings and cars stuck under rubble.