How a "small paradise" turned into a grave: the collapse of a luxury building in Antakya

The real estate development was advertised as a "slice of paradise," a building constructed to "the highest standards of construction." Today it is a pile of rubble.

Rönesans (Renaissance) Tower, until Monday, was one of the most exclusive vertical complexes in downtown Antakya, a 12-story block of 10,500 square meters. It had 249 apartments with two to five bedrooms each, a swimming pool, sports fields, reception... It housed approximately 1,000 people.

Most of them are still trapped under the rubble of the earthquake, which has already killed more than 22,000 people. One of the missing is Sevtap Karaabduloglu, a teacher from Van, a city in southeastern Turkey. "She very consciously chose this high-rise complex because she knew what an earthquake was like. She experienced it in Van in 2011 and lived in a temporary camp for a few months. So when she came to Antakya after living in a teacher's hostel for a year, she searched very carefully and chose Rönesans," her friend and former classmate Eje Yılmaz explains by phone from Istanbul. Her husband is in Antakya as a volunteer trying to help in rescue efforts. The two, along with other friends and relatives of the victims, have set up a channel on Telegram to share information and ask for help.

As in other areas of Hatay province (in the south of the country), emergency teams took more than a day to arrive, although there are now rescuers there from the AKUT voluntary association, as well as from Romania and Hungary. "Even though 72 hours have passed, there are still people alive there. Voices can be heard from under the rubble, but there is not enough equipment. Please let's spread the word on all platforms. Let's reach the survivors while they are breathing," asks one of the channel participants in Telegram.

One of the difficulties in rescuing the people trapped in Rönesans is that one of the facades collapsed on top of the rest, making it easy to access some of the first floors and rooms on the side of the collapsed facade, but making it difficult to access the other side where the facade crumpled the rest of the floors. "It was a very severe collapse," one witness said. On Friday morning, the company provided a thermal measuring device that revealed there were still survivors under the rubble, although their condition is critical. - "There is a group here that is on the verge of death," explains one cameraman in a video recorded by one of the volunteers and shown to the EL PAÍS newspaper. "His [body's] temperature has dropped a lot," replies another. "There are three people there.

Low nighttime temperatures combined with lack of food and water, as well as trauma, made survival difficult three days after the earthquake. In some cases, rescuers have removed the bodies of people who, despite surviving the collapse of buildings, died of hypothermia.

"They have already rescued several people. But we still haven't received any information from Sevtap or her sister Mehtap. With each passing day, our hopes are waning, but we still want to believe they are alive," Yılmaz says, breaking through her tears.

Theoretically and according to the financial newspaper Dünya, the Rönesans apartments were built on a floating foundation, which better withstands seismic activity and is used on terrain with low bearing capacity. Construction started in 2012 and was completed in 2013, so it was required to include all anti-seismic measures required by law. For this reason, apart from its amenities and location, it was a typical choice among people who came from other provinces to work in Antakya for a few months or years - usually teachers, engineers or even soccer players. Ghanaian midfielder Christian Atsu, who played for Malaga and Chelsea and now plays for Hataysport Football Club, was one of the tenants. He is also reported missing.

There are still examples of buildings built in 2018 and 2019 that also collapsed in the same Hatay province where Antakya is located, as well as in other regions of Turkey. In an interview with the BBC, Pelin Pinar Giritlioglu, chairwoman of the Union of Engineers and Town Planners in Istanbul, estimated that up to 75,000 buildings in the quake-hit area have received "amnesty." This means that for paying a fine, they are allowed to continue to exist even though inspections show that they do not meet the construction or anti-seismic protection standards required by law. Even the Ministry of Urban Planning itself admitted in 2018 that half of the buildings in Turkey do not meet the standards. But these amnesties continue to be granted, especially in periods before elections.

In fact, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced one before the elections in May. Rönesans construction workers, brothers Mehmet Yaşar Çöskun and Hüseyin Yalçın Çöskun, are also missing. But not under the rubble. The websites and phones associated with their offices are down, as EL PAÍS has been able to establish. The former partner, an architect, explained that he was unaware of their whereabouts, and his last job that he knew of was with an investment and citizenship business in Montenegro, with offices in Istanbul. The company's former accountant told Turkish publication ArtiGerçek that the last time she spoke to Hüseyin Yalçın Çöskun, he was in Montenegro. No one has been able to contact him since the earthquake.