Moving piles of rubble with an excavator, Akin Bozkurt consoles himself with the thought that the discovery of the body will give relatives the opportunity to bury a loved one and get a grave where they can mourn.

“If I prayed to find a dead person? Yes… to give his body to the family,” he says.

Bozkurt, 42, traveled to the southeastern Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the February 6 earthquake, from Caesarea (250 kilometers north) to help demolish damaged buildings.

“When they pull a body out from under a ton of rubble, families wait with hope… They want to have a chance at a decent burial,” says Bozkurt.

He recalls a time when his father, who was trying to warm himself near the ruins of his house, approached him and begged him to find what could be left of his daughter. “He told us: please find at least one part of her body so that I know where her grave is,” says the 42-year-old man, adding: “…this is really a tragedy!”

Thousands of new graves have been unearthed at the city cemetery, underscoring the scale of the devastation.

More than 46,000 people have died in Turkey and Syria since the February 6 earthquakes, and the toll is expected to rise as searches for survivors under the rubble draw to a close.

“I rolled a cigarette and smoked,” said the 60-year-old survivor.

A survivor of the deadly February 6 earthquakes told Turkey’s Anadolu News Agency yesterday Saturday how he kept his cool while remaining locked in the ruins of a building in southeastern Turkey’s Antijaman province for 56 hours.

“I didn’t know how many days we spent under the rubble… I had tobacco with me, I rolled a cigarette and smoked,” says Ziya Soner Tugtekin, who was rescued with his son 56 hours after the 7.8-hour crash. An earthquake of magnitude shook Turkey and Syria.

He and his son may have made it out of the rubble alive, but his wife and daughter weren’t so lucky. “During the earthquake, my daughter and wife tried to approach me. The ceiling collapsed on them and they died on the spot,” he says. “My son Denis fell into a trap and broke his ribs.”

For those who find themselves in a similar situation, he advises first of all to keep cool.

Rescuers pulled him out of the rubble literally with a cigarette in his mouth. “When they pulled me out of the rubble, I had a cigarette in my mouth. They told me to throw it away, but I didn’t because that’s how I survived,” he added. He did not part with her even on a stretcher, on which he was carried out of the quiet area.

On Saturday evening, a new earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit central Turkey, the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center (EMSC) said.

The depth of the earthquake was 10 kilometers, and its epicenter was located 54 kilometers northwest of the city of Kahramanmaras.

There were no reports of damage.