At first glance, it is a happy image – hundreds of smiling faces torn from newspapers and pasted into a frame. But these are ghosts, victims of the 2023 earthquake in Turkey that claimed more than 53,000 lives.
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The montage was put together by an artist from the city of Antakya, the site of ancient Antioch, whose life was among the thousands upended when the 7.8-magnitude quake devastated huge areas of southern Turkey in the early hours of February 6, 2023.
“I don’t know who they are but I ‘know’ every single one of them,” says artist Emel Genc, 43, who adds that she wept as she added each face.
“When I put people’s memories into those frames with all that emptiness and despair, they see their own lives. There is sadness but also happiness that someone is trying to keep those memories alive,” she says.
No place was worse hit than Antakya, where 90 per cent of the buildings were lost and more than 20,000 people died in the town and the surrounding Hatay province.
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