My companion, Caner (pronounced Jahn-ehr), my oldest friend in Turkey, made my coming to Soma much easier—not only because he was a man but because he was Turkish. Caner could also see things in Turkey that I could not; often he could see things about the world that I could not. After I wrote the story about Soma, for example, Caner helped with the fact-checking, which for this magazine, The New York Times Magazine, was especially rigorous, if not, at times, insane. (A fact-checker and I once spent a half hour debating the difference between clubhouse and playhouse.) Caner joked with some wonder about the zeal of American journalism and I explained that the obsessiveness was not only about legal issues but about maintaining a kind of objectivity. In other words, I said, the truth. He laughed at me: “But that attitude about your objectivity is political in and of itself.”
Soma’s main street looked like many Turkish towns: well maintained and orderly. Freshly tended flower beds flanked the roads, World War I memorials—good old Atatürk in bronze—shone as if newly polished, people scrubbed the pavement outside their shops. During the summer evenings in Soma, men, and sometimes women, gathered in one part of the central tea garden, and women and children, and sometimes men, gathered in the section called the family salon, and everyone would sit for hours smoking and gossiping past midnight. Soma wasn’t a place where people went to bars, or rarely even out for dinner, but it had one fancy coffee shop with plush gray chairs, and one relatively expensive chain restaurant called K?fteci Ramiz. In these poor communities, there wasn’t money for much else beyond the home, but Turkish families supported one another reflexively; a miner would work his whole life just to build two-room houses for his three sons. I was a thirty-six-year-old unmarried childless woman living thousands of miles away from her family, and had long subscribed to typical Western ideals of individualism. But with seven years of distance from New York I had come to believe that it was the Turkish family that held Turkey together, it was the strongest thing. Soma had a wholesome Mayberry quality to it, a sense of conservatism and distaste for provocation. All around the main square the watchful pillars of the community stood at the ready: the mosques, the men’s teahouses, the mining company offices, the police, the ruling government’s AK Party office, the mayor’s hall, and, in the center of it all, in a large, black-reflector-windowed building, Türk-??, the union that represented the coal miners of Soma.
We headed toward a narrow, pedestrianized street that was draped overhead with grapevines, which protected us from the miserable Aegean summer sun. A group of men gathered outside the office of DISK, a small, leftist labor union founded in the 1960s—one to which none of the miners belonged—that had set up shop in the aftermath of the disaster to teach the miners their rights. The union reps offered us plastic chairs, and some tea, and within minutes men began to sit down all around us, as if my appearance had been scheduled, which it had not.
Some of these men were the miners themselves. They had wizened faces, scrawny bodies as if undernourished, and bad teeth. I could tell which miners had been in the mine that day because they blinked constantly, as if unsure of where the next blow might come from. Turkey is a country where men are more important than women; sons more important than daughters; husbands more important than wives. In Turkey men were the warriors, the ones who had liberated the nation. It seemed suddenly that Turkey’s men had been defeated, and if the state treated even the men this way, I thought, then everyone had been flayed of whatever had once protected them from the elements.
*
A MINER NAMED AHMET told me the story of what happened on May 13, 2014, the worst industrial accident in Turkey’s ninety-year history. He and his wife, Tu?ba, lived in a three-room stone house in a village of Soma called Kayrakalt? that was nestled amid cypress trees, fresh streams, and gentle, golden hills. Most of the 350 people of Kayrakalt? used to farm Turkey’s famous Oriental tobacco, but around fifteen years ago, small farmers began to struggle, and so Ahmet went to work as a shearer-machine operator at a mine called Eynez, owned by Soma Holding.
When he arrived there that morning, Ahmet changed at his locker and put on his miner’s coat and boots lined with iron, and then he and seven hundred men began their descent into the mine. “Hadi! Hadi!” (Come on! Come on!) the supervisors yelled, always with an eye to speed, to production. When the men changed shifts, they said to one another, ge?mi? olsun, or get well soon, even hakk?n? helal et, which is a way Turks forgive one another, if they fear it is the last chance to do so. Ahmet’s gallery was in one of the deepest parts of the mine, where the coal was extracted by a giant shearer machine manned by forty men. Ahmet worked all day, until suddenly, around 3:10 p.m., the shearer machine stopped working. The coal conveyor belts stopped working; the electricity stopped working; everything stopped working. The power had gone out. Only the lights on the miners’ yellow helmets shone in the dark. Some electricians wearing gas masks arrived to tell them a cable exploded and a small fire had broken out. The miners in Ahmet’s gallery figured it would take only half an hour before someone signaled it was safe to leave.
After the first hour passed, they began to worry. Why hadn’t anyone come to talk to them? What was taking so long? Some of the men went to investigate what was happening, but they didn’t come back. There were no safe rooms in the mine, so instead the miners began to pray. Black smoke was being pushed into their gallery, from both ends. All the miners had masks attached to their belts, but few had faith in them. The masks were old, and they were encrusted with coal dust. Some miners put them on and breathed in dirt. Some masks did not work at all.
The smoke began to burn the men’s faces. Ahmet felt light-headed. Some knelt to the ground and stuck their faces in the mud, rubbing it over their skin, breathing it, slapping it into their mouths. They crouched and coughed, breathing that filthy coal-mine mud. Then men started to run, just to run anywhere. Ahmet saw Ibrahim, a portly engineer, sitting on the ground, his gas mask slung around his neck. He was breathing, but blood was coming out of his nose. A man named Ali sat under an old, useless conveyor belt. His body was cold. Ahmet realized what was happening: the miners were dying. He had no choice but to put on his mask and try to escape. As he passed, some of his friends turned toward him, arms stretched up, as if reaching for his hand.
When Ahmet climbed up a ladder to a second level, he saw bodies on a conveyer belt, as if the men had believed it would eventually carry them out. Other men lay on the ground. And near to them, also on the dirt floor, Ahmet saw dozens of rats that he knew were dead because their fangs were showing, their jaws open and stiff. Here we are, he thought, the brotherhood of rats and men.
Ahmet survived, eventually stumbling out of the mine into the klieg lights of rescue workers above. This was the image the country saw on television that day: thousands of families—fathers, mothers, wives, children, grandmothers—gendarmerie, state NGO rescue teams, police, and ambulance workers swarming around the entrances to the mine. People were screaming, pushing, crying, demanding answers. Every time a man emerged alive, coughing and black-faced, the crowd applauded. Every time a body was clumsily brought out on a stretcher, the great crowd wrenched and lurched forward, trying to see whether they could recognize anything at all: the cut of the hair, the curve of an eyebrow, the bend of a nose.