KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkey — Melih Kazanci had a simple wish as he prepared to bury his in-laws, who were crushed in the earthquakes, a gesture that might leaven some of the grief. He wanted them to rest in the earth together, side by side.
The couple could not be reunited. The cemetery was growing too fast.
The breakneck expansion of the burial ground outside Kahramanmaras, a city near the earthquakes’ epicenters, is a glimpse of the staggering toll the quakes have taken on Turkey and neighboring Syria, as well as the overwhelming task to come. More than 21,000 people have died, officials in the two countries said Thursday, and bodies are still being recovered hourly from the husks of collapsed buildings on both sides of the border.
Many of those who perished in the flattened apartment blocks in Kahramanmaras, including along the central Trabzon Boulevard, were sent to the morgue at a local university hospital, which has received at least 1,500 bodies since Monday, according to Durdu Mehmet Okutucu, the hospital’s deputy director. Unidentified bodies were being stored in refrigerated trucks, he added.
He had been at the hospital since right after the earthquakes, leaving only for a few hours, to attend funerals for relatives. “We have experienced things we have never experienced,” he said.
A sports hall in the city center is also serving as a temporary morgue. Outside the hall Thursday, a 25-year-old volunteer who had traveled from Istanbul sat against a wall, looking shaken. “I’m not feeling okay,” he said, asking not to be identified.
“A lot of children died. I saw them myself. Every two minutes, the bodies are coming.”
Inside, below stadium seats, dozens of bodies were resting on the floor. A young man walked into the hall and gently laid a toddler near another child wrapped in a blanket. The man sat there, crying, until another man helped him up.
Later that day, the funerals in the Kahramanmaras cemetery were carried out every few minutes, as yellow backhoes dug new rows of graves.
There appeared to be 500 or so wooden planks that served as headstones along the rows. Dozens more bodies wrapped in blankets or body bags sat in another area of the cemetery, awaiting inspection by the authorities before burial permission was granted.
The site was attended by a small army of officials and volunteers, including mortuary drivers and religious clerics, as well as men and women who washed the bodies in vans outfitted for that purpose.
Onur Yalcin, a 41-year old truck driver, was at the cemetery driving one of the vans. He had come all the way from Kayseri, 150 miles away, to volunteer his services. At one point, he said, he had been parked at the cemetery for 2½ hours. In that time, 150 bodies arrived, he said.
Just up the road, a group of women from Balikesir, in western Turkey, said they had come to help wash the bodies of female victims before burial. One of the women, who gave her first name, Fatma, said being at the cemetery was “difficult, of course.”
“Because there are so many,” she added. “Little girls and their mothers.”