For 12 years, I have been taking vacations in Turkey, where I have family. For 12 years, Gaziantep has been at the top of my list of places to see. But for 12 years, I always put off my visit to this historic city sitting on the Silk Road, renowned for its bright green pistachios and its gastronomy.
The reason is very simple: long before the terrible earthquake that occurred early Monday and of which it is one of the epicentres, this city in southeastern Turkey was already in the eye of the storm. At the heart of the storm.
Located just 100 kilometers from the Syrian city of Aleppo, “Antep”, as it is nicknamed, quickly became one of the main Turkish rear bases of the conflict in Syria.
Refugees flock there. Humanitarian organizations and journalists too.
Within a decade, the city’s population nearly doubled, from 1.3 million to nearly 2.2 million. Of this number, almost a quarter are Syrian refugees.
Only Istanbul, the megalopolis of 18 million inhabitants, is home to more displaced people from the neighboring country.
More often than not, Gaziantep has suffered the worst echoes of war. In 2015, Syrian documentary filmmaker Naji Al-Jerf, who exposed the atrocities committed by Daesh to the world, was killed in the middle of the street. The assassination has chilled the blood of Syrian reporters and rights defenders who continue to do their work there.
The following year, in August, a terrorist attack attributed to the same jihadist group killed more than 50 people in a Kurdish wedding. The entire population felt targeted.
These upheavals and 12 years of war ended up eroding Gaziantep’s hospitality. With the approach of the legislative and presidential elections to be held in June in Turkey, anti-Syrian remarks are increasingly popular.
Gaziantep, the baklava capital of the world, is no longer dripping with sugar syrup.
And now an earthquake shakes its heart, kills hundreds of its children and knocks down dozens of its buildings. Even his castle-fortress, which has held firm despite 1800 years of human turpitude, has lost its armor.
“All that’s missing is a volcano raging. Let something come out of the ground,” Lina Chawaf, general manager of Rozana, a Syrian radio station broadcasting from Paris and Gaziantep, told me on Monday.
The Syrian from Damascus has an easy joke despite the horror in which she finds herself. “We lived through bombardments, we lived alongside death, forced displacement. All that was missing was another disaster,” she tells me via WhatsApp.
When the earth shook, she was in a hotel in Gaziantep. She took the minimum and fled to the street. “It was so strong, I thought I was going to die there”, she testifies from a car in which she took refuge. It’s a miracle to have him on the line. The cellular network works little or not in the affected region. “We tried to return to the hotel lobby, but there was jolt after jolt,” she laments.
She remembers Gaziantep when she first set foot there in 2013. Back then, it was a small, cheerful, somewhat conservative city. It was known for its cuisine, its history, its artisans. Not for its refugee camps and its role in humanitarian and military logistics. Not as an outlet for various traumas and resentments.
For 12 years, I have constantly postponed my visit to Gaziantep to the Turkish calends. The journalist in me has never lacked interest in the city that has been transformed by the war in the neighboring country, but the vacationer in me can hardly imagine going there to take a break from international news.
Now that I see the gutted buildings, the faces covered in tears, the mountains of rubble that cover the streets, I find myself thinking about my next vacation in Turkey and putting Gaziantep on the itinerary.
I would have missed the call while the city was facing a thousand and one headwinds. I want to be part of the warm breath that will allow it to rebuild itself.