The photograph of a father holding the hand of his dead daughter, taken by an AFP photographer, was one of the images that went around the world after the devastating earthquake on February 6 in Turkey and Syria.
Almost three weeks after that catastrophe that caused more than 44,000 deaths in Turkey, Adem Altan, the photojournalist who captured that image, met again with Mesut Hancer, a Turkish national.
This father of four children, including 15-year-old Irmak, who died under the rubble of an eight-story building, recently left the city of Kahramanmaras, in southeastern Turkey, and went to live in the capital Ankara.
“I also lost my mother, my brothers and my nephews in the earthquake. But there is nothing comparable to burying a child”, explains this man in his 40s. “It is indescribable pain.”
His family is now trying to rebuild their lives away from devastated Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the magnitude 7.8 quake, which also struck northern Syria.
The image of Hancer, petrified with pain and indifferent to the cold and rain, symbolized the tragedy that tens of thousands of people experienced and provoked a wave of solidarity.
A businessman from Ankara offered them a house and proposed that Hancer hire him as an administrator at his private television station.
“Like an angel”
In the living room of his new home, he hung a painting, given as a gift by an artist, showing Irmak with angel wings next to his father.
“I have not been able to leave his hand. My daughter slept like an angel in her bed, ”explains this orphaned father of one of her children.
When the quake struck at 4:17 a.m. (0117 GMT), Hancer was working at his bakery.