“I’m still sensitive to sound,” says Ekrem Eksioglu, taking a second to regain his concentration as cutlery clatters in the background. He is not alone in that. Sometimes it only takes heavy footsteps along the wooden floorboards outside their rooms for Hatayspor’s players and staff to sit bolt upright in the night. “Did you feel that too?” somebody will ask their colleague at breakfast. The answer can usually be found in their eyes.
Eksioglu cannot blank out the noise of lives collapsing around him. He was in his seventh-floor apartment, shared with his fellow assistant coach Gokhan Kagitcioglu, when an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 hit Antakya at 4.17am on 6 February. The tower block buckled, its walls converged.
“Hearing everything falling down, people screaming, my neighbours, kids especially. And I was stuck there, praying to God. I thought about my kids, my wife, my mother and father: how they would cope if I was dead. It was like being alive in a coffin.”
Survival came down to the most brutal rolling of a dice. For Eksioglu it was “some kind of miracle”. The building was still shuddering when he realised there was now a window to his right. From being boxed in and breathing thick dust, he could feel fresh air and rain. He climbed out and found himself barefoot, freezing, atop a mountain of debris. Dazed and disoriented, he looked around and yelled Kagitcioglu’s name.
Every Hatayspor employee who escaped has a story worthy of Hollywood, Eksioglu thinks. The club’s tale is no different. Antakya, a city whose greater area housed 400,000, was destroyed by the earthquake and a similarly sized convulsion that followed nine hours later. Swathes of the surrounding Hatay province in Turkey’s far south were decimated.
Once the human and material costs became clear there was no question their Super Lig season could continue. But here, on a pre-season training camp tucked in the mountains between Istanbul and Ankara, they are quietly preparing for a top-flight return nobody could have expected.
“Sometimes I think we’ve been given a second chance,” Eksioglu says. “All of us here are healthy and still able to work. That’s why we have to keep going.”
The setting is calm, nourishing and a world away from the devastation Hatayspor were forced to flee. Fatih Ilek surveys a fishing lake flanked by pine trees as he remembers travelling to their training ground on the outskirts of Antakya in the earthquake’s aftermath. The facility had largely remained intact and became a haven for those who could, through the rubble and the devastation, pick a route there.
“One by one the players and coaches arrived,” he says. Eksioglu was among them. So was a heavily cut and bruised Kagitcioglu, who had been trapped under his bath but was freed 90 minutes after the earthquake.
Later, there was also a baby to tend: the one-year-old daughter of another coach, Osman Ates, who was rescued after eight unimaginable hours and had gone to hospital with his wife. As each new face showed up they were greeted with clothes, food, hugs, tears and several dozen different recollections of hell.
Each returning figure brought relief but Ilek grew increasingly fearful for his boss, the sporting director, Taner Savut. They had been close for more than a decade and joined Haystapor together in July 2022, Ilek assisting his dear friend. “I kept thinking: ‘This guy has come, another guy has come, Taner will come as well,” Ilek says. “All the time: ‘He’s going to come, he’s going to come next.’ But he never did, and the pain will always stay with me.”
Savut’s body was found on 21 February. Ilek pulls up the call log on his phone: the pair had last spoken at 1.29am on the night of the earthquake. They had been together shortly before that, discussing the same evening’s home win over Kasimpasa and assessing potential signings for the next transfer window. “Then that was it,” Ilek says. “I’m pretty sure his last conversation was with me.”
Hatayspor lost six other personnel, with no area of the club left untouched. The only first-team player who did not survive was Christian Atsu, the former Newcastle winger. Like Savut, he lived in the Renaissance building, a luxury block on the fringes of town that was said to be earthquake-resistant.
“In January, there was a tremor and he went into a bank the next day,” says Emre Aslan, the interpreter for Hatayspor’s large foreign contingent. “He asked my friend who works there if she had felt it too. She said: ‘Yes, it happens here but the building you are living in is strong, don’t worry.’”
Atsu had scored the winner against Kasimpasa with a dramatic free-kick that seemed to ignite an uncertain start to his spell in Antakya. After the match he and several teammates booked flights to Istanbul, hoping to celebrate and take advantage of a day off. Snow meant the journey was cancelled; the players returned to their homes and challenged each other to PlayStation games instead.
Those who are still here feel, all too acutely, the wafer-thin margin between life and death. The contingent sheltering at the training ground numbered 75. Two days later they were able to leave Antakya for Istanbul via buses and a flight organised by the head coach, Volkan Demirel. “When I arrived there my mother hugged me for half an hour and kept crying because she thought I had gone,” says Bertug Yildirim, a 21-year-old striker whose fresh face belies the horrors he has witnessed.
Yildirim lived in the Renaissance building but happened to be with his teammate, the goalkeeper Abdullah Yigiter, in a less affected block when tragedy struck. They were able to escape and the impulsive decision to stay overnight may have saved him.
After two weeks playing the scene through in his head, Yildirim felt only a return to football could preserve his mental health and the club facilitated a loan to Antalyaspor. “I knew I couldn’t forget the past but I had to learn to live with it,” he says.
Another Renaissance resident, the right-back Kerim Alici, sits wide-eyed as he recalls how the tower collapsed on to its front and left his apartment, at the back, among those facing the sky. “It was pure luck for me,” he says. “I was stuck between the wardrobe and the bed. Suddenly, I saw a light and, pushing and kicking, forced my way up. I put my head out through the hole and realised I could see the stars. I asked myself: ‘How can this be possible?’”
Alici went back to his family home in Izmir and struggled to sleep for a month, terror coursing through him every time his mother shut a door. Like most of Hatayspor’s survivors he began to receive psychological help. He felt ready to play again and a loan approach from his first club, the local side Altinordu, resembled a comfort blanket. “I felt safe there and their concern for me was obvious,” he says. “It helped me hugely.”
Others faced different emotional battles. The Hatayspor captain, Kamil Corekci, speaks deliberately during a walk around the training camp’s lake. Corekci, who is London-born and came through the Fulham and Millwall academies, lived in a lower-rise villa that emerged relatively unscathed. He sought refuge in his car, along with his visiting parents, and occasionally returned inside to gather belongings. But with communication networks cutting out he did not realise until much later that his teammates were gathering at the training facility. When he tried to join them, the roads from his part of the city were blocked. On returning to England, he wrestled with himself.
“I felt guilty, to be honest,” he says. “Really guilty that I’d survived it and that I wasn’t there in the city to help people.
“When I got to London I didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to leave the house. I was just sat in my room, looking at my phone, seeing what was happening in Antakya.”
The idea Hatayspor might revive within half a year felt like fantasy. Dispersed around Europe, some wondered whether they could stomach starting again. Eksioglu stayed in Budapest, where his wife works, for five months.
“I swear I thought 1,000 times about stopping everything and just spending time with my family,” he says. Alici assumed the Kasimpasa match was his final appearance. “I was thinking: ‘OK, it’s over, we can’t continue any more.’ I could not imagine that we would rise again.”
Temporary solutions
The cemetery is modest, arranged across a slight incline to Antakya’s north-east. Many of its graves are marked by short wooden planks, a number scrawled on each one and occasionally a name scratched on the back. Others are denoted by headstones, lending them a dignity afforded to those who can foot the cost. Two of the more spartan posts are dressed with adjacent children’s T-shirts, one blue and the other turquoise. “Let’s go to the beach!” reads the slogan on one; “Look at my cool sandals!” is written on the other.
The innocence is heartbreaking, simultaneously telling an entire story and none of it whatsoever. Further up the slope are burials accompanied by Fenerbahce and Galatasaray scarves; Istanbul’s giants compete for affection even in the most proudly unique of Turkish provinces. Nine such plots have sprung up around the city but they cannot convey the scale of loss. While official figures suggest 59,000 people perished as a result of the earthquake there are few who believe the toll, horrific in itself, is anything like that low.
New Hatay Stadium is visible from the top, a mile or so across the plain. Its red and white roofs are striking, modern, the hallmarks of a venue that opened two years ago. A deep crack leads along the approach road and stops at the VIP gate. Until a few weeks ago the premises held people who had lost their homes, now housed in tents. They have since been moved to the relative stability of container accommodation, joining the swathes of similar constructions around the outskirts.
The pitch has shrivelled: it is crunchy, yellow, bone-dry. It is still marked and the goals unmoved. At one end, sections of the roof have crashed down. There is hope the stadium’s structural integrity has not been fatally compromised. It is being guarded by security and maintenance personnel who suggest that, if a set of tests by the government passes successfully, it could be strengthened and ready to host matches within two or three years. To anyone who has journeyed through the flattened, apocalyptic wasteland that leads there, the notion seems impossible.
It is a lifeless picture but, closer to the city centre, Hatayspor’s heart is still beating. Most of the training ground is under the authorities’ aegis, tents filling the practice pitches and families milling between them, eking what they can from whatever a normal day now offers. But what was once the players’ relaxation room, used for food and video games, holds a bank of computers and up to eight locally based employees. Transfers are completed here, contracts drawn up, schedules confirmed. During the week, some of the staff live in containers situated opposite the makeshift office.
“The atmosphere was like the end of the world,” says Ilhan Kaya of those hours after the earthquake when cold, frightened, sometimes injured staff slowly filled the building. He had intense worries of his own: it took three days for his daughter to be recovered safely from the disaster. The avuncular Kaya has managed the training centre for 17 years and misses his players. They called him “Baba”, meaning “Dad”, and it will mean everything when they can share such affection again.
“If there is any problem in this complex I can’t rest, I have to solve it as quickly as possible,” he says. There are now two facilities to look after. Ilhan was preparing to make the three-and-a-half hour drive to the coastal city of Mersin, where Hatayspor will be based this season, to drop off a final batch of supplies.
A new training ground is being built from scratch on an old shooting range; it should be finished before November and until then they will commute from Istanbul to Mersin’s 25,000-capacity stadium for home games. Mersin has become a home from home for thousands who have fled Hatay.
“It’s a good solution but a temporary one,” Kaya says. “We will miss Antakya and one day soon we will see Hatayspor back here. This is a place of substance, family and serenity. Before the earthquake we had few big problems, just everyday things, and the club was growing day by day. Now we’ve lost 90% of our city.”
In the corridor hangs a team photograph from 2012, when Hatayspor were promoted from the fourth tier. Kaya and several auxiliary staff are folded into the group. Hatayspor were founded in 1967 and did not play Super Lig football until 2020, bobbing around the lower divisions until then. Their ascent was a marvel in itself; another reason nobody will countenance letting so precious an institution slip away.
Volkan Daloglu, the club’s fixture coordinator, knows that better than most. His father, Ahmet, was an uncompromising defender during their years in the doldrums. Ahmet and his teammates would routinely pay for their own travel to away games; money was scarce and prospects modest. It has taken ingenuity to get this far and looking over the repurposed pitches from an observation tower Volkan tries to make sense of how the view has changed. Schoolchildren in Antakya, an ancient city plagued by earthquakes throughout its history, would be put through preparatory drills three or four times a year but there is little grounding for a shock so deadly.
“Scientists say if you do something 21 times, on the 22nd it becomes a habit,” he says. “Of course we get used to this sight, but it’s just so sad. These people have lost everything, and all of us have lost our childhood memories. We need support and we expected more. It’s hot, there’s little water, conditions are getting tougher here. Six months is a long time and people are tired.”
The thought of arranging games again pleases Daloglu: for everyone here, restoring the club provides an essential sense of purpose. Hatayspor will begin the season at Pendikspor the weekend after next and then, in a twist of fate, will host Kasimpasa on their debut in Mersin. The activity will be all-consuming but he cannot forget running, with his family, out of their apartment block that night in February.
Several players lived there too and he remembers the relief as security staff kicked down doors to free some of them, the Portuguese midfielder Rúben Ribeiro jumping to safety from the first floor. He is still haunted by what struck him a few weeks later, when the extent of his own loss hit home. “Eventually I went through my phone to delete the numbers of people who had died,” he says. “I got to 50 and couldn’t bear it any more. I had to throw the phone away.”
Keeping the flame alive
Demirel has come in from Hatayspor’s first training session of the day and feels satisfied. “There’s a fire in this team, maybe you’ve seen it too,” he says. “I’ve noticed it ever since we came back. It’s not easy to work like this after the level of hardship we’ve been through, but everyone is trying so much to help each other.”
Every conversation with a member of the training camp dwells for at least a few minutes on the subject of Demirel. The verdict is unanimous: without him there would be no Hatayspor, no revival, no chance to show the world that a symbol of their ravaged region can stand tall.
Sporting icons in Turkey have hardly come bigger in the past 20 years. You loved the abrasive, outspoken goalkeeper if you supported Fenerbahce or cheered for the national team at an international tournament; otherwise your emotions may have differed wildly but it was a playing career that left nobody cold. Now a towering, dramatic presence as head coach, Demirel took an entire club on to his broad shoulders and decided to carry it with him.
He admits it took time. For more than two months after the earthquake Demirel did not know what to do. He had returned several times to Antakya, joining search missions and facing the awful task of identifying Savut’s body among many others. The attitude from some of Hatayspor’s rivals, squabbling inanely over points lost as a result of their enforced withdrawal, also dismayed him.
“It was hard to talk to him at first because he was so down,” the skipper, Corekci, says. “You could tell how it affected his morale. And because he’s our leader we thought: ‘What are we going to do?’”
It was back in Antakya that a flame lit inside Demirel, who had only joined the club last September. “It was the national celebration day for children, 23 April, and there was an event in Hatay,” he says. “There were almost 2,500 kids who’d got out of the rubble and I just looked at their eyes. They needed something, some hope, and it made me think about the future.
“I understood that they were the future of our club, our community, so I made a decision that we would be there and give them that hope. I started to make plans immediately. I needed to hug this club and be its leader.”
The joke goes that every decision at Hatayspor, down to the colour of the stationery, is run past Demirel. He swung into action single-handedly, knowing his profile ensured a hotline to the country’s highest powers. New sponsors – “seven or eight” – were secured and aid enlisted; at times it felt he was never off the phone. It was not long before the club could feel confident of playing again.
One of the favours he called in was a fortnight’s stay here: the lakeside sports resort is owned by Fenerbahce and was a feature in his summers as a player. “I was always a man who loved challenges,” he says. “In difficult times I have always tried to help people. But this situation has been something extraordinary.”
There were few jobs bigger than creating a team “from zero”, as he puts it. Hatayspor had lost half a squad, either through contracts expiring or players choosing permanent moves. The side that trains ferociously among the hills blends earthquake survivors with 10 new signings, a handful of trialists and academy prospects such as Ali Yildiz, whose family are among those forced to make do in containers.
Demirel toured Europe in search of new players, starting with visits to Portugal, Germany and Albania. He wanted to meet every potential arrival himself: to assess whether they had the stomach to fight and the character to represent something bigger than anyone. “I decided against two or three players, but on the whole they were successful meetings,” he says. “Sometimes I’d propose the project and, because of the earthquake, they would be afraid. But there is a reality in life. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow and if you think terrible things will keep repeating themselves, you become frozen. You’re stuck in that moment. I told everyone: if you want to come with me, come.”
When Hatayspor returned to training at the end of June, initially using the Turkish Football Federation’s facilities, the reunion felt overwhelming. “We hugged each other and there were many tears,” says Mehmet Dokumaci, the long-serving club masseur. “We were happy, but at the same time so sad. We’d kept saying that if Hatayspor started again we would come straight back. Even if Barcelona called me, I would never go.”
Ilek agrees. “If I went to another club I would be betraying Hatay,” he says. He has unofficially taken Savut’s role, but the sporting director title has been retired. Eksioglu, a close ally of Demirel who had previously assisted him at Fatih Karagumruk, knew he had been right to come back. “I have to take that responsibility as the city really needs us,” he says. “So many are waiting for us to bring some happiness.”
By playing a friendly against Turkish-owned Hull in Bursa, Hatayspor defied the odds 154 days after their world fell apart. Aslan, the interpreter, is impressed by how Demirel’s recruits have listened and learned from their peers. “They’ve integrated easily and understand what is going on here,” he says. “It’s not only about three points, it’s a project for a region, a people who are trying to survive.”
Down by the water, the strapping forward Yildirim has caught the biggest fish of the day. He returns it to its habitat while taking his friends’ congratulations. It feels like another small step along the path to something called normality, although several of Hatayspor’s contingent say they check themselves, almost involuntarily, if they find themselves having too much fun. Sometimes they are absent-minded or easily distracted. “The mourning process takes time and we are going to need more,” Eksioglu says. “We will never forget.”
Striding towards a brighter future while glancing tenderly to the past. That is the balance Demirel wants Hatayspor to strike over the next 10 months. “Winning, losing, points, cup, I don’t mind about those,” he says. “This year the only important thing is to make earthquake victims happy. I want to give them the message that if I can rebuild this club, they can rebuild their own lives, too.”
