‘It is a very worrying time for everybody’

The small Turkish community based in Tullamore has been clamouring to help their fellow countrymen in the wake of the devastating earthquake which has completely destroyed large areas of southern Turkey and northern Syria.

Arif Soysal, one of the co-owners of the popular Captain House restaurant on Main Street says members of his family felt the after-shocks from the massive 7.2 magnitude earthquake in their home city of Antalya, which is located over 800 kilometres from the epicentre in Gaziantep.

“Antalya did not get any damage from the earthquake and thank God all my family are safe,” said Arif “but the aftershocks were felt all over southern Turkey, so it is a very worrying time for everybody who has family living there.”

Arif and his business partner, fellow Turkish native, Okan Kiraz, have been running the Captain House restaurant for 11 years, and say they have been continuing to receive “huge support” from their Irish friends and from the local community in Tullamore since news of the earthquake broke on Monday morning of this week.

“All we can do from this distance is send financial aid to our families and friends back home, which we have been doing” he says “but the scale of the disaster is so huge it is going to be a very, very long time before the country can recover from this.”

Arif, who has been living in Ireland for two decades, is very critical of what he describes as the “wide-scale corruption culture” in Turkey, particularly in the building sector. “Many of the apartment blocks which are being sold at very high prices are listed as being earthquake-proof, but that is not the case at all,” he claims.

“There is no perfect place, except maybe heaven, but I am very glad to live in Ireland because, even though we may give out about a lot of things, there are laws in place,” he says.

Like Arif Soysal, the proprietor of the award-winning Blue Apron restaurant on Harbour Street in Tullamore, Kenan Pehlivan, also hails from Turkey, but his family home in Bolu, near the Black Sea in the north of the country, is a ten-hour drive from the epicentre of this week’s devastating earthquake.

Nevertheless, he admits to feeling “totally helpless” in the face of such widespread devastation in his home country, and is planning to set up a GoFundMe page in the coming days to try to raise funds to help with the massive relief effort. “We will top up the money raised by the same amount and then we will select an established partner to make sure the funds get to those who need them,” he says.

Kenan, a multi-award winning chef and his Tullamore-born wife, Sarah Thomas, have been running The Blue Apron since 2011 and return to Turkey every couple of years to visit extended family and their many friends.

“It will be at least this time next week before we have a clearer picture of the death toll and the true scale of the destruction,” says Kenan, who predicts that many people who survived the earthquake are “just as likely to die from exposure during what is a really harsh winter in Turkey with freezing temperatures and snowstorms”.

Since the last major earthquake in Turkey in 1999, Kenan Pehlivan says the building regulations have been overhauled and “on paper they are excellent” but he adds that the people implementing the regulations “can be corrupted”.

He points out that many of the apartment blocks in the densely-populated areas which were hit by the earthquake were built prior to 1999 and they just “collapsed like a deck of cards” and he says “time will tell” if the buildings constructed post-1999 were able to withstand the force of the earthquake and if the strict building regulations were actually adhered to.

“No one country can manage a crisis as big as this on their own, the whole world will have to help and with the death toll rising every few hours we still don’t know the true scale of what has happened and that is the saddest thing” says the Tullamore-based chef.

The only way that another locally-based Turkish man could think of helping his native country when he learned of the huge earthquake was to post a message on his Facebook page appealing for emergency supplies to help the stricken people of Turkey.

Fatih Kozankaya, who runs Tullamore Turkish Barbers on Patrick Street, is askingmembers of the public to consider donating items such as winter clothes, tents, beds, mattresses, sleeping bags, blankets and also boxes of non-perishable foodstuffs.

“I am planning to deliver everything to the Turkish Embassy in Dublin over the coming days, so if anyone has any spare clothes or feels they can help with this appeal in any way, I would be so grateful,” he says.

Mr Kozankaya, who is from the well-known Turkish holiday resort area of Kusadasi, on the western Aegean Coast, has been living in Ireland for the past 14 years. He has spent the last seven years in Tullamore and says he loves the town and its people, who have been very supportive of his business.

“I still have family in Kusadasi which is a long way from the epicentre of the earthquake, so thankfully they are all safe, but the scale of the disaster that has hit the country is hard to imagine,” he said “It will have a terrible effect on the whole country.”

Fatih is planning to return to Turkey over the next week to help out with the relief operation and says he will do whatever he can. “The needs are so great that it is hard to know what to do, but I felt I had to do something which I why I put out the Facebook appeal for supplies."

He says those wishing to help with his appeal can drop their donations into his barber shop and he will ensure they are delivered to the Turkish Embassy in the coming days.

“I will travel up to the embassy today, tomorrow, any day because it is important that everyone does whatever they can to help Turkey at this time” he says. “Even if people can only help in a small way it is better than not helping at all.”

Meanwhile, a Turkish journalist who is based in Tullamore, is critical of the Erdogan government in Turkey for ignoring the warnings from scientists three years ago that an earthquake would happen in Turkey.

Cagdas Gokbel says “unfortunately the Erdogan administration is one that does not want to hear the voice of science.”

He adds that search and rescue teams at the epicentre of the quake are “completely inadequate” and the current government are “incapable” of organising emergency aid.

Mr Gokbel adds that scientists in Turkey have estimated that 12 million people in 10 cities have been affected by the “great destruction” caused by the earthquake.