BUYUKNACAR - Buyuknacar was a picturesque village perched high in the mountains of southern Turkey until it was effectively wiped off the map by a catastrophic earthquake that killed tens of thousands a month ago. Little is still standing in the settlement that was home to 2,000 people before the 7.8-magnitude struck on February 6, its epicentre just 26 kilometres (16 miles) to the south. The tremor and its aftershocks claimed more than 45,000 lives in Turkey and 5,000 in neighbouring Syria. It killed 120 people in Buyuknacar, an agricultural village surrounded by rugged mountains and lush valleys filled with oak and pine trees. “Only four or five houses are still standing, but they are all damaged,” said Ziya Sutdelisi, 53, a former village administrator. “We were always told that our ground was solid. Nobody warned us our village was in peril,” he said. Few know what will happen next.
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Turkey stretches across some of the world’s most active fault lines and is no stranger to big shakes. But none has been as damaging or deadly since Turkey became a republic after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago. Ziya’s wife Kiymet said the villagers felt relatively safe at more than 1,000 metres above sea level. “Then everything crumbled in a few seconds,” she said, surrounded by the rubble of stone and concrete homes. Survivors who stayed behind now live in tents, grieving and reliving the horrors of being woken in the pre-dawn hours by a jolt that upturned millions of lives. Sutdelisi is still haunted by the rumble of the moving ground, which swung buildings like pendulums in the dark