Pink smoke tore through blue skies, as families, lulled by their day at the beach, drove home from the resort town of Cesme, on the Aegean coast in Izmir province, on Aug. 17, 2024. Less than an hour later, they stopped their cars along the road leading to a massive wall of fire, powerlessly watching as the agitated amber beast devoured the flank of the mountain to which it was spreading.
“Where are the helicopters?” one baffled onlooker in a summer dress asked. “We need to get them water,” she went on, trying to take matters into her own hands. Summers have a bittersweet taste in Turkey, one of the Mediterranean countries hardest hit by wildfires. Memories of 2021 are still raw: It was the country’s most devastating fire season, when the hottest May recorded in the last 50 years sent nearly 350,000 acres up in smoke.
That year, the flames began in Antalya’s Manavgat region on July 28, with hundreds of other blazes starting simultaneously across the country. Planes grazed residential areas through thick black smoke, entire mountains shimmered like magma at night, and ash poured from the skies in what felt like the end of the world. At least eight people were killed, hundreds were hospitalized for smoke inhalation and thousands were evacuated. Entire livestock herds were wiped out, together with countless olive groves, orchards and beehives that provided ancestral livelihoods to locals. Government reforestation efforts are still ongoing in Marmaris and Manavgat, the coastal districts worst hit by the fires, while citizens continue to debate the country’s firefighting policies.
When the fire season comes, a whole ecosystem activates. Sweating through the summer heat, firefighters and volunteers take turns combating the forest infernos, engineers train hotel managers and their staff in fire prevention, and pilots from Spain, Russia and France remain on constant call, able to scramble firefighting planes within 12 minutes.
In the summer of 2024, wildfires were up by 80% compared to the previous year. By December of the same year, 3,780 fires had ravaged through nearly 70,000 acres of forest — an area about the size of Malta — according to confidential data we reviewed. Exceptional meteorological conditions influence the intensity of the blazes, but climate change is not the only factor to blame for such destruction.
As part of a cross-border project investigating the causes behind the summer flames eating up forests in Italy and Turkey, New Lines consulted a dozen researchers and forest engineers, as well as environmental impact assessments and reports. We met with local associations, Tahtacis (descendants of a centuries-old Turkmen community named after the Turkish term for woodworkers) and firefighters across Izmir, Mugla and Antalya, important international tourist destinations that were hardest hit by fires. Faced with a scarcity of government data, we used satellite imagery to assess the expansion of mining activities, filed freedom of information requests and plunged into the financial publications of the General Directorate of Forests (OGM), the institution in charge of protecting woodland areas from fires.
“We will repaint this country emerald green,” declared President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last November, during the fifth annual celebration of National Forestation Day. “We have increased the country’s forest cover by 12%,” he went on to add, referring to his project to plant 7 billion saplings to fight erosion.
Official data from the directorate claims Turkish forests have never been wider and thicker, but our investigation tells a different story. Although the administration pushes a strategy focused on firefighting, its unsustainable forest policies are increasing interactions between woodlands and human settlements, fragmenting lands, damaging forest ecosystems and heightening the risk of wildfires. In the last 20 years, during which Turkey was led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the woodlands have been decimated by relentless land allocations to mines, hotels and infrastructure projects.
“It sometimes feels like we’re talking to a wall,” said Hüsrev Özkara, chairman of the Foresters’ Association of Turkey (TOD), which represents engineers from around the country.
Next to a cemetery on the road from Aydin to Cine, in Aydin province, is the home of the married Tahtaci couple Medet and Sevgi Uçaravcı. They are in their 50s and live in the heart of a forest. The OGM hired them to cut middle-aged red pine trees that are preventing homogeneous growth, a practice known as forest thinning, carried out every five to six years.
Every year, the directorate’s forest managers attend to a new parcel and decide which trunks need to go. An indentation at eye height on the bark and a black round stamp at the base seal the fate of the tree. Occasionally, an inaccurate mark may appear, but Medet has been training his eye since he was 12. “I know the forest better than someone who studied it,” he said, sitting on the floor of his home, a forest cabin that once served as the residence of the village teacher. “I’ve been watching forests since 1984.”
The community of Tahtacis, spread across the forested coasts of Marmara, the Aegean and the Mediterranean, has attended to forests for generations. Most descend from families working as lumberjacks under Ottoman rule and have inhabited the Turkish wild land for centuries. They know its perils and riches.
“For Tahtacis, the forest is sacred,” Bircan Bozdağ, a retired member of the community, whose family has been cutting trees for over 100 years, later told us. “I didn’t decide to become a Tahtaci.” We met him at his summer cabin surrounded by tall fruit trees, in a remote settlement on the plains near the villages of Yenikoy and Dutlukoy in Aydin province. “I was born into this calling,” he said.
Along with thinning, Tahtacis also clean forests lost to flames — an enduring relationship with official institutions that has brought them a livelihood while helping preserve woodlands.
But during the 1990s, the directorate developed long-term plans to determine quotas for the sale of wood. From the early 2000s, when the AKP took hold of the government, the forestry system was reformed and decentralized. Regional administrations began overestimating forest growth and the amount of wood they could produce to get recognition from the headquarters in Ankara, according to the head of TOD’s Antalya branch, Necati Baş, who was responsible for management plans at the OGM for almost 10 years.
With its generous estimates of forested land, the administration justifies increased exploitation of the woodlands. “Erected sale” of logs is also meeting an increasing demand for wood, officials say. This practice requires auctioning entire areas of the forest to buyers and contracting the logging to private companies or forest cooperatives. The method, widely used to remove discarded trunks, is believed to threaten biodiversity through the use of heavy machinery and also excludes villagers from the work.
Working as a Tahtaci has always been precarious and involved strenuous conditions, few benefits and poor retirement prospects. But the Tahtacis we spoke with shared that an increasing number of community members have recently been stepping away from the job. Uçaravcı said that there were once 100 families working as woodcutters in their village of Kocarli, but now “only two, three families are left.”
“The relationship between the forest villagers and the forest administration has been broken,” said Baş of the recent practices.
Kadir Y. woke up to an unexpected scene on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024: His eighth-floor view over the Gulf of Izmir was obstructed by a gray curtain of smoke, panicking neighbors were shouting in the building corridors and the usual noise of planes passing overhead was replaced by that of flying helicopters.
“I looked outside and couldn’t see any flames but … was surrounded by such a thick smoke that I couldn’t see the sea anymore,” the retiree said, describing the scene after the fire reached his residential building in Bayrakli, a municipality of Turkey’s third-largest city.
When electricity was cut off and the internet signal became intermittent, Kadir packed his passport and a change of clothes. He walked down the stairs to his car but faced a bottleneck: Fleeing residents were blocking the way of fire engines, bumper to bumper, more than a mile from the closest highway.
“We had no idea what to do, stuck between a fire and traffic,” he said. “There was no official communication, people were nervous, shouting at each other. I heard some people left their cars in the middle of the road and went on foot to leave the area.” National newspapers, which published sensationally titled pieces like “Don’t even use a lighter,” reported that this was the first time in years an urban area was being evacuated because of a forest fire.
Permit regulations allow mines and other structures in woodland territory if building them is considered “in the public interest,” a vague phrase for which a list of exemptions is regularly updated. Today, anything from street animal shelters to sports facilities can be built on forest land, allocated for 49 to 99 years. These repurposed areas look nothing like forests, but the temporary nature of the allocations means they still officially count as woodland.
The time limit of these allocations can be changed by the president, based on a historical law for “the development of forest villagers” and, since 2018, Annex 16 of the main forestry law. The head of state can demote altogether areas they judge unsalvageable from forest status. As woodlands lose their official status, limitations on construction and allocations also vanish.
Experts we interviewed from the TEMA Foundation, an organization set up to fight erosion in Turkey, refer to these sets of laws as “legal axes” — legislation that they say is even worse than saws and fires.
Kadir moved to Bayrakli, “the area with the strongest soil in Izmir,” because it offered respite from the earthquake menace looming over the rest of the city below. But the area was once known for its erosion. In 1995, a flood killed 61 residents and displaced hundreds of people. To improve the soil, authorities planted trees on the equivalent of nearly 2,000 football pitches and officially granted forest status to the area.
Wildwood has long been protected by two forest laws and Article 169 of the Turkish Constitution: The reduction of their boundaries is prohibited. But over the past 20 years, frequent amendments to the main forestry law have made it ever easier to obtain a permit for various developments.
In 2020, based on Annex 16, the president requested the exclusion of about 925 acres of land from the forest next to Kadir’s neighborhood, arguing there was “no scientific benefit” in preserving it as forested. By the time the Council of State overturned this decision in October 2023, claiming it went against the constitution, the Housing Development Administration (TOKI) had already built 300 residential buildings on the forest.
In 2020, the president excluded about 925 acres of land from the forest to build 300 residential buildings. (Placemarks)
Just as the bark was cooling down from the flames that Kadir fled, which blazed through nearly 4,000 acres of forest, the president once again invoked Annex 16 for the exact area the Council of State had reinstated in 2023, including about 220 acres of charred woodland. “All burnt land must be restored,” says the Turkish Constitution about consumed forests, adding that the custody of all forests belongs to the state. But over the last few years, the state has shown that its priorities lie elsewhere.
In the past decade, legal permits to exploit woodland areas destroyed almost twice as much forest as wildfires. Motivated by what experts say is financial gain, permits were given to mining, construction and industrial activities on more than a million acres of woodland. “This is about the size of Istanbul, transformed from forests to roads, bridges, electrical infrastructure, mines,” said Doğanay Tolunay, a lecturer at Istanbul University’s Faculty of Forestry, comparing the area to Turkey’s largest city, home to 16 million people.
These projects often encounter pockets of resistance from locals, with some infamous cases sparking outrage and making international headlines. Elderly villagers and environmental activists fought unsuccessfully for years to stop the development of a coal mine that destroyed more than 1,800 acres of the Akbelen forest in Mugla, with violent clashes in 2023 becoming the most notorious case of opposition to government permits in forests.
Experts we talked to also warned that official forest cover figures are misleading. National forest inventories, which keep a thorough record of the country’s tree stock, are conducted every 10 to 20 years in Turkey, failing to account for forested areas that have been razed in the interim by development or mining projects and that should otherwise be recorded as “treeless” forests. The long interval between inventories was denounced publicly by the country’s Court of Accounts back in 2020. Five years later, despite upgrades to the system, the data is still not reflective of the situation on the ground, according to experts we interviewed.
“Antalya is without a doubt the world’s most beautiful place,” modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, declared upon seeing the Mediterranean city in 1930. Given the number of international tourists flocking to the area year-round, many seem to agree with him. Green roads lead to the coast, where long beaches are bordered with lush trees, framed by dramatic mountains plunging directly into turquoise seas.
But Antalya is also a victim of its own success: Signposts marked with Cyrillic words indicate the way to the city’s many resorts, and these huge hotels are nibbling away at the forests in which they are built. “When we ask tourism resorts what they will do in case of a fire, they say they will call [emergency services] to report it, but they have no other protocol in place,” Özkara said. “When challenged about their lack of preparation, they say, ‘Inshallah [God willing], we won’t be affected by fires.’”
In October 2024, the centenary forestry organization, with support from WWF-Turkey and private bank Garanti-BBVA, partnered with Turquoise Hotel and Linda Resort in Antalya to train hotel managers and staff on the measures to be taken in case of a fire.
Ali Kavgacı, who manages the training project and is a faculty member of Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, suggested that the fire in Bolu Grand Kartalkaya Hotel, where 78 people lost their lives on Jan. 21, 2025, could also occur in tourist destinations such as Antalya.
“Many hotels have the same unpreparedness as this hotel. We know this,” he said. “Hotels may [go up in flames] from a nearby forest fire, or a fire could break out at one of these hotels and spread to forests.” Despite the risk, Kavgacı said hotels lack well-designed mitigation measures and the capacity to implement them.
The Turkish public sees wildfires as a way for developers to take over land in the country’s forests that is otherwise protected, but the reality is that legal instruments are to blame for these projects. The introduction of the tourism encouragement law in 1982, and its regular updates, often in contravention of the constitution, have made the government’s legal interventions an “inextricable” part of developers’ ability to take over land meant to be forested, according to legal experts. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has been under public scrutiny since 2018, when Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, one of the country’s most prominent tourism developers, with massive luxury hotels in Antalya and Bodrum, was appointed by the president.
“Developers don’t have anything holding them back, so they can pick between building their hotel in a heavenly creek and building it on a burnt area. Which one would you pick?” asked Hikmet Öztürk, deputy general manager of TEMA.
As flames were reducing entire districts to ashes during the July 2021 megafires, and citizens were doing what they could to help those in need, AKP members of Turkey’s parliament supported significant amendments to the laws to encourage tourism development. Mandatory environmental impact assessment reports were removed, and the right to grant permits was transferred from the Forests and Agriculture Ministry to the Culture and Tourism Ministry. The changes garnered online public scrutiny, including criticism from the singer Tarkan, one of the country’s most popular stars, who said on his social media accounts that Turkish people will “clearly have to fight harder to protect our country’s nature.”
Beyond Manavgat, Belek and Kemer — Antalya districts allocated to tourism in planning projects dating back to the 1970s — the forested landscape begins to change: Verdant highlands are mottled with bright pockmarks, indications of a sickness spreading through the mountain’s fur. The Mining Law and its substantial amendments in 2004 eased the exploration and operation in forests of mines and quarries of all kinds.
In the village of Alacadag, off the southwest mountain range descending from the Antalya basin, a man pointed at a hill where excavating machinery moved along the open mining pit set in the middle of the forest. “There is dust everywhere, our gardens and vegetables are full of it,” said an older villager, his voice cut off by the rumble of the trucks speeding down the peaceful valley known for its orchards, their containers loaded with huge marble blocks.
Aggressive mining activities — which, experts say, are often not conducted according to the appropriate standards and techniques — cause the most damage, with dust emissions from open pits, especially for marble, preventing tree photosynthesis and growth, drying trees up and making them more vulnerable to pest attacks.
“Mining enterprises do not have any action plan for forest fires,” mining specialist, forest engineer and TOD Antalya member Süleyman Kaçar explained in our written correspondence. While they file deeds of commitment that detail the preventive provisions that they need to take, “this is just a formality on paper,” Kaçar added.
One of the document’s most explicit conditions is to keep the areas surrounding energy transmission lines clear of flammable materials such as dry weeds. “Power lines carry the highest fire risks in Turkey,” Kaçar wrote.
Our calculations based on official OGM data show that forest fires caused by energy infrastructure like high voltage lines, power plants and transformers account for almost 30% of all land burned in 2023. An official report we consulted from Mugla’s regional directorate confirmed that fires starting from energy transmission lines and transformers have “significantly increased” in recent years.
With limited access to official data, in May 2024, New Lines sent several freedom of information requests to the OGM. One of them inquired about the number of permits given out for construction in forests. About nine months later, in February 2025, an official reply informed us that permits in forest areas are given in accordance with the Forestry Law, and that construction permits were not granted in forest areas (we also requested the list of fires for the last 20 years, and an up-to-date forest map, but were turned down and redirected to public data). Faced with this information gap, we partnered with the satellite imagery studio Placemarks to estimate the actual number of extraction sites in Antalya.
According to the findings, mines and quarries in Antalya province consumed an additional 1,350 acres between 2013 and 2023 — over one and a half times the size of Central Park — and we counted a total of 76 active mines or quarries based on Placemarks’ evaluation of satellite data.
This quarry was granted an exemption from the obligation of undergoing an environmental impact assessment when it was given a permit in 2013, and again for an increase in its operational capacity in 2018, although a technical report acknowledged the risk of forest fire because of electrical infrastructure, highly flammable oil and burning of substances. Satellite imagery shows that the whole mining area went up in flames during the 2021 megafires. (Placemarks)
The surge in open-pit quarries and lavish hotels also means more roads and electrical infrastructure: In 2021, before Turkey was choked by the unprecedented megafires, almost 75,000 acres of woods were razed for new transmission lines, almost 20,000 were given away to uproot trees and rake the earth for lucrative minerals or metals, and almost 10,000 were turned into asphalted avenues.
Over 10 years, nearly 150,000 acres of forest were eaten away by roads. In 2023, some 2,500 miles of new roads were built through the country’s woodland and only 100 miles of fire lanes — paths created to navigate and battle flames. As concrete, asphalt and heavy machinery fragment woodlands throughout Turkey, the human interaction with forests increases, and so does the possibility of human-caused fires.
“Forest fires are increasing because we are increasing the presence of people in forests,” said Erdoğan Atmış, a faculty member of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. On official registries, the causes of most Turkish fires destroying woodland remain unknown, and the number of fires caused by mines is yet to be recorded in official statistics. But from picnicking to excavating minerals, experts say 9 out of 10 fires are linked to human activity. “Is it negligence? Carelessness? Intent? Accidental? Natural causes? How are you going to stop fires without knowing what causes them?” Özkara asked.
For Atmış, the causes come down to policy choices. “It’s not about burning forests to make hotels, mines and whatnot. The real reasons behind forest fires right now are the incorrect policies of the ruling party.” Scientists agree that the Mediterranean basin is more prone to burning because of its climate, that meteorological conditions can transform a spark into a blaze and that climate change is set to intensify these synergies. But they have found that most forest fires are caused by the carelessness of humans, and a lot can still be done to prevent that.
On the scorchingly hot tarmac of the Selcuk airport, just over 500 yards from the historic city of Ephesus south of Izmir, four men in yellow outfits were giving off Top Gun vibes. They were the pilots hired by the forest directorate for this year’s fire season. They come from Spain, France and Turkey and fly bright yellow Air Tractor AT-802 planes up to eight hours a day, carrying more than 3 tons of water in bombers filled at the Selcuk airfield.
A fascination with the aircraft seems to have swept over Turkey. Whenever parts of the country are burning, concerned citizens take over social media, asking why planes aren’t flying around, putting out the blazes. But the truth is, they can only help contain a fire. If the blazes are small enough, they might be able to extinguish them; when big fires erupt, the water will evaporate before it even reaches the flames.
“Fires can’t actually be put out from the air,” pilot Kıvanç Soydan, one of the four in uniform, said. “Fires are extinguished from the ground. So it’s down to the work of the teams on the ground. We can only provide support to them and intervene in areas that can’t be reached by land.”
Kenan Öztan, a retired forest engineer who knows the area well, confirmed what the pilots said. He has been planning and managing forests by putting together inventories for the directorate for nearly 40 years. To stop blazes, Öztan said engineers need to meticulously set up their intervention front, watering surrounding trees and sometimes even taking down or burning healthy trees on the fire path. Priority goes to housing and settlements. But he insists that the battle can only be won on the ground.
Experts estimate that 22,000 workers are needed to fight these frontline battles. But OGM numbers show it employed just 11,450 workers in 2022.
The economic crisis that hit Turkey in 2018 forced cuts across the government, including in the directorate’s firefighting budget. While the earmarked amounts nearly doubled between 2020 and 2022, the Turkish lira’s loss of value wiped out any additional budget increases, and the current firefighting budget of $2.7 million is still a fifth of what it was pre-crisis. Meanwhile, the directorate allocated nearly $35 million for the acquisition of helicopters and planes. The government seems to have a soft spot for flashy interventions meant to dazzle the public.
We drove down the curved road leading to the plains of Gokova, where it’s easy to miss the exit into Akyaka — a seaside resort gaining popularity among Turkish tourists rushing to the banks of the Aegean.
Visitors in modest dress next to others in bikinis covered every inch of the public beach with their towels, folding chairs and picnics, while bright pink bougainvillea flowers watched over travelers taking cheeky dips in the cold and strong currents of the Azmak stream.
Not far from the joyful kerfuffle of vacationers, matching off-white houses with rounded balconies, intricate roofs and wooden shutters balance Ottoman architecture with 1970s design. Some of these neatly aligned, two-floor buildings are only a couple of yards away from large pine forests that surround the resort and provide a bit of respite from the sun.
Only two roads lead in and out of Akyaka — the thrilling descent on the asphalted tracks from the Mugla plateau, and the winding single lane loosely following the curves of the coast until Bodrum, some 75 miles west. The municipality is nestled in woodlands in the crook of the Gulf of Gokova. It’s nothing short of a miracle that Akyaka has been spared by fires when all three districts neighboring Ula, the administrative center that Akyaka belongs to, are covered with patches of burned land — wounds sustained from massive blazes that have taken place over the last five years. “Akyaka residents could die in the event of a fire,” said forest engineer Ahmet Genç, pointing to the high summer season crowds and the limited routes in and out of the municipality.
He was standing in the middle of what he said should officially be a dense forest, with a canopy that doesn’t let the sun seep through. Pine branches should shield the soil from direct sunlight to avoid the proliferation of climbing plants. Instead, trunks had been cut haphazardly, letting through rays and facilitating the growth of small foliage plants that degrade the quality of the woodlands.
There is a science to cutting trees, Genç said, pointing to a “whipping” red pine. When Akyaka’s Deli Mehmet (“crazy Mehmet”) wind blows from all sides and residents wait for the gusts to calm down, this tree’s branches flog neighboring trunks. The pine was an obvious candidate for the axe. Instead, it was standing tall, taunting the knowledge of the engineer who carefully planned forest management at the directorate for over 15 years.
“The problem is that, from minister to manager, it’s people who don’t know these things that are in charge nowadays,” Genç said. “Instead of cutting trees that have reached their potential, the current policies require more frequent cutting that favors immediate money over sustainability.”
Red pines are endemic to Turkey’s west coast and are fire-resistant. At 60-70 years old, when their growth slows and they reach peak carbon-capturing capacity, they are cut to make way for the natural sprouting of the next generation. The trees in this part of the Akyaka forest are about 40 years old. Chances are, they won’t make it another 30 years and will either be cut prematurely or burn down.
“This place is a ticking bomb,” said the forest engineer, pointing to dried branches and creeping plants. In the event of a blaze, bushes would rapidly transform the flames into a treetop fire — the most devastating type of wildfire because it spreads quickly over the dry canopy. In such events, red pine cones can be thrown miles away and ignite flames in distant areas, setting several wildfires in a short time.
To avoid this disaster, Genç suggests that the directorate manually clean parts of the forest that are particularly close to residential areas, that it keep fire lanes clear and that it educate residents. According to the expert, this would be money better spent than “all the money in the world” earmarked for helicopters unable to extinguish treetop fires.
“The goal of OGM shouldn’t only be trying to put out fires, but also preventing them from happening in the first place,” Genç said. “If a blaze ignites here on a windy day with reduced relative humidity, you’d be in the hands of God. No helicopter would be able to put out those flames.”
We contacted the OGM, the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the presidency for comment. Only the OGM replied, stating that the claims made in the article were “subjective and not based on concrete data.” They requested that we share with them the data on which the article is based. We shared our calculations, based on OGM official data, that were used throughout this article. We received no response in time for publication.
A couple of hours further north, in a forested area off the Aegean coast, a tree stands along a winding road leading to rural villages on the outskirts of Cine, Aydin. Purple scarves and laces dangle from its branches. Every year, from May to October, as the fire season gnaws at the forests bordering the lush gardens of villagers, locals entrust their dreams onto this tree’s limbs.
“It’s a wish tree,” said Servet Toptaş, secretary-general of the Aegean Association of Tahtacis. This tree’s roots are entangled with the body of a woman who killed herself in the 1970s. As we crossed these forests, from one Tahtaci village to another, Toptaş told us her story.
It is customary among Tahtacis and other nomadic communities of Turkey for women seeking relief from a violent husband to sport a purple vest, called “mor cepken,” as a cry for fellow villagers to intervene. In the case of this woman, no one did. She took her own life under this tree, after losing her children to sickness and foul weather while on the run through the forest. Her remains are buried under the tree where her fate was sealed.
Not far from there, further down the trail, the forest gapes unexpectedly as the vegetation darkens: Bright green shapes disappear, and the landscape turns grey. A couple of weeks before our visit, a fire claimed trees here. Toptaş asked that we stop the car and take a few steps onto the ashen floor. Dust flakes started dancing around him. “This is where I spent my childhood,” said Toptaş, 49, his voice breaking.
Still further up the road leading to Izmir, in Kusadasi, Aydin, turquoise waters stretching out to the horizon are lined by dizzyingly monolithic holiday resorts. A pregnant Tuğçe Naz was absently staring out at the view on an overlooking hill, while washing dishes at a sink and running the laundry in a machine next to her. It would be an idyllic open-air setting, were it not for the acres of blackened trees separating her from the shores. We were at a temporary Tahtaci campsite, bordered only by a few eucalyptus trees and tents. A trained eye could spot where fire workers choked the flames, due to the straight black line cutting through the forest, but from where we stood, everything looked apocalyptic.
Logging workers are driven down the straight, man-made forest lane that splits the highland in two, their bodies jolting and swaying aboard the back of trucks loaded with blackened, clear-chopped logs. Supervising them from the campsite, a man named Işık Aka smoked a cigarette as workers began loading more of the logs he and his family had cut onto trucks. He was overseeing the cutting for this area, and payment would be arriving soon for him and his family: his sister, brother-in-law, their two sons and brides, among them Tuğce Naz. We came across them on two separate occasions, months apart, while visiting the location over the summer.
“We go where the fire is, where we get a job,” Aka said. When there is no work, he and his family live in a village in Menderes, Izmir, though he is originally from Adana, hundreds of miles to the east. They have been here for two months now, sleeping in makeshift tents and attending to the burned wood. Aka is an entrepreneurial Tahtaci, employing workers so his team and family can compete with the services offered by larger businesses.
“We don’t work for a company,” he said, gazing toward a small building set in a clearing slightly further out, which bears OGM signs all over it — one of the directorate’s centers scattered across Turkish forests. A team of about 10 local fire workers were taking turns resting in flimsy beds in the rudimentary cabin while they waited for the next emergency call.
Often lauded as the country’s invisible heroes by both the governing party and the opposition, these workers are suffering the consequences of the broader problems plaguing the country’s forests. At the cabin, several of the directorate’s firefighters, who aren’t allowed to speak to the press, said it’s difficult for official workers to stay alive. The death last July of an OGM regional manager, Şahin Dönertaş, in an accident while patrolling a fire in Bergama, Izmir, is still on everyone’s lips.
Summer seasons are grueling, and several workers described sleeping on forest floors when they are fighting fires over several days. After weeks spent putting out blazes, they have to mark the dead trunks bound to become logs. “We will cut all the trees here,” one worker declared, pointing to a vast area. It’ll take two to three months to clean the nearly 800 acres that went up in smoke in that Kusadasi fire. Directorate workers will count the dead trees, and Işık Aka’s family and seasonal employees will cut down those with marked bark.
As we drove away from this improbable plateau, we pulled over to fully take in the twisted fate of this landscape, burned trees on one side, shimmering seas on the other. Öztan, the retired engineer who had been accompanying us throughout our Aegean route, walked out and took a couple of steps to stand under the shade of a massive billboard towering over the road. The sign’s colors were washed out by the sun, and one corner was even burnt, but we could clearly decipher the OGM logo and a picture of President Erdoğan, shovel in hand, planting a fir. The words “we are greening our country” in bold capital letters stood proudly against the blackened forest.
The number of forest fires has increased in the country over the past 30 years, especially since 2010. While climate change is partly responsible, the AKP’s approach to forestry also provides some irrefutable clues as to why. While the government trumpeted reforesting the country and invested in optics, rather than effective but less dazzling solutions, woodlands were decimated, and mining sites, luxury spots and other infrastructure projects thrived. This contradiction resulted in 20 years of massive green billboards trying to cover up blackened horizons.
A mile or so down the road, we noticed another sign. This time, there was a clearing of burnt land and pulverized shrubs; the fire had reached this place as well. “I wish [the fire] was a dream,” it read, with large printed letters against a background of flames and darkness, in memory of last June’s blazes.
In the recurring nightmare of forest fires, Turks can still yearn for that wish to come true. But for now, the blazes continue.
This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
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