Earthquake: Trauma and the greatest joy of my life

The Gölcük earthquake, 27 years ago today.

After only an hour of sleep, I was jolted awake at 3:02 a.m. on August 17, 1999 — everything was shaking. Wide awake and on alert, I jumped up and ran into the living room. I knew it was an earthquake. Istanbul has been waiting for the big one, and two weeks earlier the ground had trembled briefly.

I stood there helpless in the doorway — not a safe spot, as I would learn later. I watched my living room walls bulge in and out in a heavy rhythm, as if someone had given a giant bowl of Jell-O a shove.

I was certain: "This is it." I expected my old apartment building to collapse. Thankfully, I was wrong. The epicenter of the magnitude 7.4 quake was 75 miles away — something I only found out many hours later. Even so, the shaking lasted unbearably long: 45 seconds.

What followed were two nights with almost no sleep, and another eight days on four or five hours a night, because I started working for RTL immediately. To this day I'm amazed that I — and others — held up, because those ten days weren't just physically exhausting. Far worse was witnessing the severely injured, the dead, and the grieving. Some of those individual stories are enough to turn your hair gray at the mere thought of them. According to official figures, 18,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake. 1,200 in Istanbul alone.

Accelerated by the hot summer days, by the fourth day the smell of decomposition from the bodies beneath the collapsed buildings became unbearable. Even from 50 yards away you could smell where bodies lay under the rubble and where they didn't. My sense of smell has been hypersensitive ever since. I still notice that smell everywhere, always — long before anyone else does. Thankfully, these days it usually comes from a dead animal by the side of the road.

There's no need to go into the exact details here. Just this much:

About ten days after the earthquake, more than seven German TV crews arranged to have dinner together in Istanbul. We had kept running into each other while reporting on the ground. In those first days especially, there was almost nothing to eat or drink in the disaster zone, and even rival networks were remarkably collegial — we helped each other out. Over dinner, everyone talked about the moment that had been "too much" for them. The moment they, too, had cried — and every single one of us had cried at least once. Usually not because of the horrific images or the destruction, but because of the endless suffering of the people affected. Back then, "psychological support" for media workers was rare. Thankfully, that has changed.

The trauma is still there. It caught me completely off guard while we were filming in Cappadocia in February 2023. At 4 in the morning we felt the outer edges of the magnitude 7.8 Hatay earthquake. In our hotel room, the ceiling lamp swung from side to side. I knew immediately: people are dying right now. Once again, I had no idea how far away the epicenter was, or how vast the scale. The next day the news made the extent clear to me, and I fell into a depression, because I knew exactly what infinite suffering was unfolding. More than 55,000 people died in southern Turkey and Syria. Many networks called wanting to send me into the earthquake zone to report. I turned them all down: "I can't handle it emotionally — everything from 1999 is coming back up right now."

It sounds like a paradox, but it's my reality: this unbearable catastrophe also brought me joy and love.

A year after the 1999 earthquake, The Learning Channel hired me to film the story of a survivor. The photograph of Ömür Kınay — a young woman pulled from an Istanbul building, badly injured, after a day beneath the rubble — had gone around the world. We spent several days filming her story at a rehabilitation clinic, where we were looked after by a charismatic young PR woman. She did her job very well and became the mother of my amazing dream daughter, born in 2005.

My everything.

The love of my life. Christian Feiland (Translated from the German version)

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