The earthquakes in early February reduced the ancient city of Antakya in south-eastern Turkey to a huge debris field. On the day of the quake, Ali Can Günenç and Hikmet Aksoy from Augsburg boarded the plane. Without hesitation, the nephew and uncle started a private relief effort with an uncertain outcome. Aftershocks also threatened survivors and buildings that were still standing. “At first I didn’t really understand the seriousness of the situation. There are often earthquakes where our families come from,” says Günenç. It wasn’t until the cousins wrote via Whatsapp that they should bring water and food that he understood that it wasn’t just any earthquake.
With a power outage and chaos, the city still dark and cut off from the Internet, the two arrived in Antakya in a borrowed car from Adana, almost 200 kilometers away, undamaged. The shouts of those buried could still be heard and traumatized people ran through the piles of rubble. “It was apocalyptic,” says Günenç. Friends, relatives, colleagues sent them money over the course of the two-week outreach that followed. 13 000 euros in total. They picked it up in Adana via Western Union. “We hid it in the footwell of the car. It was all a bit anarchic and not entirely harmless.”
The two were there for two weeks, treating bloody feet, taking pieces of debris out of children’s ears, distributing money, buying underwear and children’s shoes. Now they are back at home in the Bärenkeller district of Augsburg. The tranquility between the low houses and the well-tended garden doesn’t really want to go with the catastrophe of the century that destroyed their second home.
The Günenç family belongs to the Arabic-speaking minority of the Shiite-Alawi faith, of which there are several hundred families in Augsburg. They all come from the southeastern Turkish region of Hatay, its capital Antakya and the historic stretch of land between the Syrian border and the Mediterranean Sea. Paul already preached there and founded the first churches. Günenç and Aksoy speak Arabic and Turkish. German anyway, with Augsburg dialect. At the large dining room table in the winter garden, the languages change back and forth as a matter of course.
Aksoy’s father came to Augsburg from Antakya in 1972 as a textile worker. He, his wife and eleven children, including Hikmet Aksoy, laid the foundation for a new family history. The children made it up. Aksoy studied plastics technology in Rosenheim and now works for Webasto as a project developer. The 44-year-old travels across the EU. His nephew Ali Can Günenç, 33, the third generation, trained as a laboratory technician and paramedic and is now studying medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He also works in an oncology practice and is writing his doctoral thesis.
The immigrant city of Augsburg, with its long flourishing textile industry, has written such stories a thousand times over. A total of 23,000 of the roughly 300,000 residents there have a Turkish background. Many of them come from the eleven provinces where the quake shifted the land area by six meters. According to official figures, 50,000 people lost their lives. In the two Alawite organizations in the city, the Alawite cultural association and the 18 associations of Turkish-born Muslims, the dismay is great.
Ali Can Günenç (left) and his uncle Hikmet Aksoy set out together from the Bärenkeller district of Augsburg to help in the Turkish earthquake area.
(Photo: private)
Aksoy senior moved back here after retirement. He was a Shaykh, an Alawite scholar, and published theological treatises and owned a private library of 4000 books. He fell into the street at his eighth-floor apartment after the lower floors collapsed. Hikmet Aksoy found the father’s body and wrapped it in a blanket. A truck driver who happened to be passing drove her to the university hospital. “The experience of driving my father through this chaos on a cold truck bed was the worst thing for me.”
The funeral was also an exceptional situation. “We dug a grave for him at night, in complete darkness, in the cemetery next to our family home,” reports the nephew. He still sees his uncle standing over him and reciting suras with his mobile phone. “The blue light that illuminated my uncle’s face in the dark. I will never forget.” They found a missing cousin under the rubble. A pillar had fallen on him. “He wanted to save my grandmother, who was sitting a few meters further back in the apartment. Nothing happened to her. He must have died immediately,” says Günenç.
The building where he spent his childhood vacations had fallen over. The body lay in a crack. “We really wanted to save him, for his father.” Without further discussion, unmarried relatives and those who are already fathers should be included in the column. “I’ve already seen my children. Your wife is pregnant, stay out. That’s what they said to me.” The cousin’s body was trapped, with no excavator in sight. Günenç, the medic, explained to the men in the gap how the body had to be divided in order to be able to recover it.
An excavator driver rescued 300 books from Aksoy’s father’s library.
(Photo: private)
In general – the excavator drivers. “Without them, nothing works,” say Aksoy and Günenç. People are sleeping on the street in front of “their” rubble. To guard her until the excavator comes. Police officers were standing in front of a house. “They directed the excavator drivers’ shovels into the holes that used to be their homes. They wanted to secure their weapons,” says Aksoy. An excavator driver rescued 300 books from the father’s library by controlled collapse.
But the two also criticize. “There was no help for us – for days. Of course you wonder if that’s because we’re Alawites,” says Aksoy, controlling his anger with difficulty. Your mission is not over yet. When his father’s 40-day mourning period ends on Thursday, he will “go down” again. Hikmet Aksoy is a sheikh – an office passed from father to son in the Alawite community. And a commitment to perform the ceremonies for his father at his grave. And donate an ox. He organized the public oven for roasting from Augsburg, and he will distribute the meat.
The two have built up a local network. Their independent help from Germany has earned them trust, they say. The network consists of a pharmacist, an engineer and three cousins spread across the city of 390,000. Günenç still has 1,000 euros to be used. “Our contacts report the need to us, we discuss this and also check it. I trust them absolutely,” he assures.
On Facebook, under the Account al.can.77 uncle and nephew document their work in the earthquake area and the use of the donations. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but we feel that people are already thinking ahead. They want to build up again.” These two German families, who number almost 200 people with nieces and nephews in Augsburg alone, will also lend a hand.