After the earthquake, he did not have time to immediately visit his church to see if the building survived. “How can I go when my ‘children’ are in ruins,” Father Pavlos, a priest from Antioch, Turkey, says of members of his parish. First, he had a terrible task to complete. With the help of his brother and two other men, he searched for the bodies in the ruins to bury them in an Orthodox cemetery, rather than take them to some unmarked grave. In five days he performed 38 funerals. He still remembers the funeral of a six-year-old boy, which he had to prepare himself, as the parents were in a hospital in Mersin, where their other wounded child was being treated. “Those were difficult days,” he says.

Father Pavlos is now in Mersini and is trying to coordinate the assistance provided to the displaced Christian Orthodox community there. When he talks to “K” via WhatsApp, he hears the noise of the earthquake victims taking refuge in the holy temple of the Archangels. According to him, there are about 800 people in the area. Seventy of them stay at a hotel, the rest with local residents who welcomed them into their homes, and some are accommodated in a church. They are offered food and clothing, but there is a great need for additional supplies.

“When the church fell, I also lost a part of myself. This was our home.”

The 31-year-old priest was born in Antioch and was ordained five months before the earthquake. He was in Balamad, Lebanon, when the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck in the early morning of February 6th. He felt a strong tremor, but could not imagine the extent of the destruction in his hometown. The next night he managed to reach Antioch. Some locals have already left the city, but the poorest remain. At first, he couldn’t, in the dark, with the power outages, figure out exactly what had happened. With the first rays of the sun, he realized the extent of the destruction. “The view was not as I knew it,” he says. “Practically everything collapsed, not a single apartment building remained. Now there were only piles of rubble.”

Photographer “K” Alexandros Avramidis spotted Father Pavlos in his flattened church, perched on top of the rubble raising a white cross. The Holy Church of Saints Peter and Paul was once again damaged in the past by a fire caused by lit candles during the 1872 earthquake. The church was restored and in 2011 included in the list of candidates for the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. . “I am now working with the power of Christ, I don’t have my own power,” says the priest “K”. “When the church fell, I also lost a part of myself. It was our home, our castle, the square where all the Christians gathered,” he says.

The Antiochian Church has been described as the “Mother Church of the Nations” since missionary tours began from there with the visit of the apostles Peter and Paul. Before the earthquake, the Roman Orthodox community of the city numbered about 1,200 people. Most of the survivors were sent by bus to Mersini, while others left for Istanbul in the hope that at some point they would recover what they had lost.