Erdoğan donated more than 7,000 new homes to the residents of Hatay province in a ceremony.
Year then Hasan Yetmez lay in the ruins of a recently collapsed apartment building, cold and waiting for help. Screams were heard all around. He tried to scream himself, but no one came to help. It was almost 5:30 in the morning, it was cold and it was drizzling.
The century's most devastating natural disaster in Turkey and Syria, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, had hit Yetmez's home province, Hatay in southern Turkey, most strongly in the early hours of the morning.
Just a few hours earlier, Yetmez had returned from a soccer match in the city of Antakya, where he had been doing a sports broadcast for Turkish television. Fortunately for him, his wife and children were in the nearby home village, which was spared from the worst.
It wasn't until several hours later that he found out what had happened to family members or other people.
“Below me, 56 people had died. I was one of only four people who survived in that building,” Yetmez told STT in a phone interview on the anniversary of the earthquake on Tuesday.
According to official figures, more than 53,000 people died in the earthquake on the Turkish side. It is estimated that at least more than 6,000 people died in northwestern Syria. Hundreds of thousands of others, including Yetmez, were injured.
In Turkey, 680,000 homes were destroyed in 11 different provinces. More than a third of them were located in the province of Hatay.
On the Syrian side, the damage was significantly smaller than in Turkey, but according to the UN, the earthquake also destroyed the homes of 265,000 people there. In Syria, however, the earthquake hit a region where the need for humanitarian aid was already huge after 13 years of fighting.
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“Thank God, now I have a job again. I wouldn't wish such a disaster on even my worst enemy.”
Reconstruction has gone slower than promised in Turkey. Weeks after the earthquake, the president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan promised that within a year, 319,000 new apartments would be built in the earthquake area and eventually a total of 650,000 new homes.
According to the calculations of the BBC's Turkish-language news site, less than one-fifth of the goal has been reached at most.
Heated container homes have been set up for the people left in the destroyed area, like the ones that used to be in the area for war refugees from Syria. Children go to container schools.
However, some of the survivors are still living in tents, reports the independent Duvar news site from the disaster area of Kahramanmaraş.
Erdoğan, who visited Hatay at the weekend, donated more than 7,000 new homes to the residents of the province. 29 years old Hasan Suner was not one of the lucky ones.
A year after the earthquake, Süner lives with his wife in a still damaged house. Sometimes houses with minor damage can suddenly collapse.
“I would be lying if I said we weren't afraid,” Süner told STT by phone.
The last time STT interviewed him was three weeks after the earthquake. At that time, Süner spent the night in a car because there was a shortage of tents. As a grocer, he stocked food supplies that he distributed to other survivors.
“Thank God, now I have a job again. I wouldn't wish such a disaster even on my worst enemy,” he says.
Supplier Yetmez was finally rescued from the ruins by three young Syrian refugees. In a persistent rescue operation, they were able to detach his leg. Through many twists and turns, Yetmez was brought to a hospital in the capital, Ankara, where he is still an outpatient and practicing walking.
“The people and friends we lost will never come back,” he says.
“Eventually, we'll go back there, no matter what.”
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