Quake Death Toll Keeps Gravediggers Laboring

These gravediggers don’t stop working--even for the funerals. There are just too many bodies arriving.

Laborers hired for about $11 a day hack at the heat-baked soil in a weedy corner of the Bagcesme cemetery. Almost as soon as a grave is completed, another earthquake victim is carried through the iron gates.

Hour after hour, the funeral processions creep up the steep hill. Below lies Izmit, a gritty port city east of Istanbul that is the epicenter of Tuesday’s deadly quake.

“We can’t stop working,” gravedigger Mehmet Ozturk, sweat drenching his T-shirt, said this week. “It might be disrespectful while funerals are going on, but we have no choice.”

More than 40 victims have been laid in the new graves, their names etched in pen into simple wooden markers. There is room for hundreds more in the clearing, but there are more than 3,200 dead in Izmit and hundreds still missing.

“We will just keep digging,” Ozturk said.

The burials mean more than just the tears of farewell. Health authorities, fearing diseases such as typhoid from decomposing bodies, have appealed to families to arrange quick funerals, or the state could take over.

In Adapazari, east of Izmit, government workers buried 963 people in a mass grave Thursday. Many bodies were left trapped in rubble or placed in makeshift morgues.

On Thursday, Cengiz Aykut stroked the body of his 7-year-old daughter, Goksin, who was laid out on a wooden table and wrapped in a white burial shroud according to Muslim tradition. A coffin next to her held her 2-month-old brother, Mehmet, and their 65-year-old grandfather, Erol.

Aykut’s wife stumbled toward the bodies. Her leg was bandaged, and her face showed the cuts from the collapsing apartment walls that killed her two children.

“No, no,” she said, turning her back on the bodies. “I can’t say goodbye.”

Her husband took her lightly by the arm and drew her toward the coffin, which is traditionally discarded before the shrouded bodies are lowered into the grave. “Goodbye, my loves,” she finally whispered.