Antakya.
The ruined city is essentially more city.
Perhaps the city is what remains after the buildings, streets and memories that hold the city together are buried under
ruins. Maybe a "voice" will gather all this ruin and bring it together. The 'Hatay Academy Symphony Orchestra' set out
for this.
One rail of this 'high-speed train', which is heading towards disaster faster and faster, is the 'state of emergency'
and the other rail is 'debris'. This train has passed through the earthquake station and now continues its way even
faster.
To change today, we need pull all together the emergency brake, we need to stop this train we are on all together.
Artists from Hatay are in solidarity for this journey. A year has passed and they have turned our pain into something
bearable. Without them, this pain would be insupportable.
We felt very hopeless until Tuğçe Tezer introduced us to conductor Ali Uğur and the Hatay Academy Symphony Orchestra.
Telling the story of our solidarity with them after this great disaster made our pain bearable. Ulaş, Aksel and Berk had
already been to the region in the first days of the earthquake, so we were able to start working immediately. After
that, Alaattin and Petra reached the solidarity network of the Labor Film Festival, to connect with the orchestra
members who were scattered all over Turkey. Then Adil, Imre and Ege, Özge Su, Levent and a very large team, whose names
you will only see at the end of the film, joined this solidarity. Despite the devastation and wounds, the orchestra met
again and again and created hope. Their story and journey stretched from Istanbul, Bursa, Izmir, Ankara to Germany.
While the solidarity of the musicians grew stronger, our solidarity expanded while trying to tell their stories. We have
lost perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives through sheer negligence and shortcomings. It is even more shameful when it
becomes a number.
The Hatay Academy Symphony Orchestra healed our wounds with their faith in rebuilding Antakya through the power of art.
Translation: İpek Yardımcı
A few weeks after February 6th, we find ourselves in Antakya. By the banks of the Orontes River, a wise olive tree
stands alone. The city's sounds have dimmed, the music in the streets has fallen silent, and a palpable mourning hangs
over the city. The Orontes River, the Mount Habib-i Neccar, and the ancient olive tree stand shoulder to shoulder,
reminiscing about Antakya's old days. The echoes of memories faintly resonate in the heavily damaged streets of Antakya.
By listening closely to this silent sound, one encounters an invitation calling for art, music, and musicians to
Antakya.The first step in amplifying and echoing this faint sound was taken when dear Ethem Özgüven and Petra Holzer
crossed paths with Ali Uğur, the conductor of the Hatay Academy Orchestra. This beautiful orchestra lost its members,
homes, loved ones, and instruments in the earthquake, but its hope remains unshaken. This encounter quickly turned into
solidarity, supported by the collaboration of cinema artists, leading to the screening of "The Phoenix Takes Flight"
documentary at the opening of the 18th International Labor Film Festival and culminating in the film you are currently
watching, "Singing in Dark Times" as we approach the first anniversary of the earthquake.We hope that this film, which
meticulously follows the journey of orchestra members who migrated to different cities after the earthquake to the
"Music of Solidarity" concert held in Istanbul on April 1st, symbolizes the beginning of a story of resilience: both of
the Hatay Academy Symphony Orchestra and the ancient city of Antakya. Enjoy the Show.
Translation: Meryem Şanlıer
Antakya.
A ruined city is, in essence, more than just a city.
Perhaps what remains of the city after its buildings, streets, and memories have been buried under rubble is what truly
holds it together.
Antakya. February 15.
Fifteen kilometers away from the center, amidst a vast plain, stands a solitary building, closed off by the earthquake
on February 6, 2023, after its opening in 2017 – the massive 'regional hospital,' Hatay Education and Research Hospital,
surrounded by field hospitals set up with international health teams and local volunteers for 'disaster volunteer
interpreting.' Well past midnight, I navigate through the dark, traversing the increasingly ominous shadow of this
solitary structure, eventually arriving at the field hospital tents.
Later, I learn that guards are placed in front of the shadowy building to prevent theft of the expensive medical
equipment by the "approved contractor," who has built prisons, high-speed train stations, and airports across Turkey,
even constructing a hospital over the dried-up Lake Amik. I wonder where these guards would flee if an aftershock were
to hit.
A police officer, with whom I chat while warming up around the fire they lit during their night shifts tells me how
bodies retrieved from the rubble were initially "stacked" at the base of this hospital. When images surfaced on social
media, the district governor reprimanded the police and ordered the relocation of all the corpses to another location.
Both police officers and gendarmerie, along with the state apparatus itself, are angry because of the conditions they
endure, from the soaked clothes to the subpar tents provided, compared to the international field hospital tents. It is
this period that Antakya’s residents have the strength to be angry.
People who came the hospital are those who managed to find and bury their loved ones, those who have their broken bones
newly cast, those continuing their lives in greenhouses and tents, children carrying burns, scabies, and lice,
infections from the cold, those who will soon leave the city after getting their casts, those who have moved to be with
relatives in villages, many arriving at this remote hospital on a single motorcycle or electric bicycle while others
encountered traffic accidents on the way, pregnant women, refugee families with accumulated health needs... Sometimes,
those seeking their missing relatives in the Health Ministry's tents...
The first patients to arrive on February 20th, victims of the earthquake, mistaken UMKE (National Medical Rescue Team)
tents, Health Ministry staff injured by building debris. That night, the sirens never stopped. The dead and the newborns
intertwined... There's no anger, just shock, a deep silence, profound sorrow.
When my duty at the hospital is over, I descend to the city center, to the heart of the destruction.
The diggers enter the debris without paying attention to dust and asbestos, take the metal, spit out the rest and turn
it into rubble.I see the police and gendarmes, unprotected from the dust, sitting amidst the rubble that pours into the
Orontes River. In the city, the only life I encounter is the sound of male cats still squabbling, approaching me for
some solace.
From that day on, the monitoring of the rapid transformation of rubble into debris and the spread of disaster across
time and space begins, an ongoing process to this day. On one hand, the companies quickly awarded contracts promise a
solution to the devastation caused by the sea of buildings that led to so many deaths, initiating more urban renewal,
further devastation. Fields, olive groves, forests are hastily expropriated for unplanned, tasteless urban designs.
Antakya's center is completely seized. Most of its registered buildings are razed without preserving their materials
on-site, merely relocated to a "special debris site" to gain the title of "cultural debris." Local community
participation is nonexistent. The cards are dealt from above. Participation games are played. Locally, there is grief,
traffic accidents, tents and container cities leaking, suffocating in asbestos-laden dust, debris scattered near
riverbeds, wetlands - vital habitats for birds, turtles - close to the coast, roadside, olive groves.
March 13th.
Another assignment at the field hospital has come up. This time it's Arsuz. The yellow trucks have gained speed and
consistency. They cover the road connecting the Arsuz Expo area, where the field hospital is set up, like a yellow
centipede throughout the day. Patients descend from that road to reach the hospital. Here, babies are born, surgeries
are performed, and people have begun to share their stories of grief. We try to translate their stories to the
psychologists at the hospital. Each word seems to take on a life of its own. No emotion, silence, or fragment of
narration should escape. When they turn back to me and say, "May God bless you," my hands and feet go numb. I can only
manage to say, "May God bless you." It's as if a societal guilt that doesn't belong to me comes to find me with this
address. The transformation of rights into dependence, gratitude. Being forced to confess. Our normal state is as it is,
so is our state in disaster. Just as the normal state in this order is a slow, invisible massacre, if work accidents,
eco-cide, displacement, animal slaughter, normalization of racism are the norm, then the state of disaster is just its
compressed form. Once again, I understand this. The 'bullet train' of catastrophe, accelerating ever faster, has one
track labeled 'state of emergency', the other 'debris'; this train has only passed through the earthquake station and
now speeds ahead. Today, we find ourselves in a trend that we all need to collectively hit the emergency brake on, one
that we need to stop. When viewed from the Antakya station, everything becomes clearer.