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

The property was advertised as a "slice of paradise," a building built to "the highest construction standards." Today it is a pile of rubble. The Rönesans Tower (Rönesans) was until Monday one of the most exclusive vertical developments in downtown Antakya, a 12-story block of 10,500 square meters. It had 249 two- to five-bedroom apartments, a swimming pool, sports courts, reception... It housed about 1,000 people. Most of them are still trapped under the rubble after the earthquake, which has already killed more than 22,000 people.

One of the missing is Sevtap Karaabduloglu, a teacher originally from Van, a city in southeastern Turkey.

"She very consciously chose this apartment,'cause she knew what an earthquake was like. She survived it in Van in 2011 and had to live for months in a prefab camp. So when she came to Antakya after living in a teacher's hostel for a year, she searched very carefully and chose Renaissance,'' her friend and former university classmate Eje Yılmaz explains by phone from Istanbul. Her husband is in Antakya as a volunteer trying to help with the rescue effort.

Oba, 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), ambulance crews took more than a day to arrive at the scene, although rescue teams from the volunteer association' are now there'AKUT, as well as from Romania and Hungary. "Although 72 hours have passed, there are still people alive. Voices can be heard from under the rubble, but the equipment is not enough. Please let's share this information on all social media. Let's get to the survivors before they stop breathing," asks one of the participants of the Telegram channel.

One of the challenges of the rescue efforts at the Renaissance is that one of the facades collapsed onto the rest of the building, making it easy to access some of the first floors and rooms on the collapsed side, but difficult to access the other side where the facade collapsed the rest of the floors. "It was a very violent collapse," said one witness.

On Friday morning, the company provided a thermal measuring device that allowed them to establish,''That there are still survivors under the rubble, although their condition is critical. - "Here is a group that is about to die," explains one cameraman in a video recorded by one of the volunteers and shown to the EL PAÍS newspaper. - "His [the body's] temperature has dropped a lot," replies another. - "There are three people there.

Low nighttime temperatures, along with a lack of food and water, as well as injuries, make survival difficult three days after the quake. In some cases, rescuers have pulled out the bodies of people who, despite surviving the collapse of buildings, died of hypothermia. "They have pulled some people out alive. But we still haven't heard anything from Sevtap or''her sister Mehtap. With each passing hour, our hopes are waning, but we still want to believe they are alive," Yılmaz says, bursting through tears.

Theoretically, and according to the financial daily Dünya, the Renaissance Apartments were built on a floating foundation, which better withstands seismic activity and is used on land with low bearing capacity. Construction began in 2012 and was completed in 2013, so it was necessary to include all the anti-seismic measures required by law. For this reason, in addition to its equipment and location, it was a typical choice for people who came from other provinces to work for a few months or years in Antakya - usually teachers, engineers or even soccer players. Gansky''s self admitted in 2018 that half of the buildings in Turkey are non-compliant. But such amnesties continue to be granted, especially during election season. In fact, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced one before elections in May.

The Renaissance construction workers, brothers Mehmet Yaşar Çöşkun and Hüseyin Yalçın Çöşkun, are also among the missing. But not under the rubble. The websites and phones associated with their offices have been disabled, as EL PAÍS newspaper managed to establish. The former partner, an architect, explained that he does not know their whereabouts, and that his last job that he knows of was promoting investment and citizenship in Montenegro, with offices in Istanbul. The company's former accountant told the Turkish publication''ArtiGerçek that the last time she spoke to Hüseyin Yalçın Çöşkun was when he was in Montenegro. No one has been able to contact him since the earthquake.