11 minutes agoHow did a small town successfully accommodate half a million people
Periskopi(7 years ago)
(7 years ago)Gaziantep is an industrial city in the southern part of Turkey, near the Syrian border, where many refugees have been sheltered in recent years. He's known for industry and fiction. Food in this city is so good that people visit it from Istanbul just for lunch. In April of [...]
In April 2011, only 252 refugees came to Turkey from the region of Alepos of Syria. A year later, that number increased to 23 thousand, and in 2015 it reached two million. Today, there are 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. Most of them live in the southern part of this country, including the town of Gaziantep.
Within just 24 hours, about 200 thousand people were deployed in Gaziantep. To compare this figure better, Istanbul with 15 million people has a total of 560 thousand refugees, while Gaziantep is the tenth city in Turkey for a population number but has accepted 500 thousand refugees.
Before the war, we had many close ties between residents of the southeastern part of Turkey and Syria. Hence, we call them guests, not refugees. Our culture and religion are similar”, said Azhar Alaska, who manages the United Nations feeding program in this city.
In the time of the Ottoman Empire, before present-day states of Turkey and Syria existed, Gaziantep and Alep were part of the same region. Refugees express a desire to stay south of Turkey, near their lands, because they have common history and have more opportunities to find jobs, writes the Guardian”.
