They Called Her Mystery. Her Name Was Vetin.

Five days after the February 6, 2023 earthquake, Hatay Province was still a pile of concrete and winter air.

Searchers had passed the window in which most buried voices stop. Then, about 128 hours after the 7.8-magnitude shock, a thin cry. Crews opened a gap in the slabs. A girl roughly two months old came out alive — scratched, thirsty, and, in the photographs that left the scene, opening her eyes to daylight as if the fifth day were an ordinary morning.

No parent was there. Nurses named her Gizem, Turkish for Mystery. (Some later retellings invented other temporary names. The one that stuck in official care was Gizem.) She was moved to hospital in Adana, then flown to Ankara.

Her mother had been listed among the dead. Yasemin Begdas was not dead. She was in another ward. A DNA test matched them. Fifty-four days after the rescue, Turkey’s family ministry brought the infant to Adana. The child went back to her own name: Vetin Begdas. Her father and two brothers had died in the same building.

The pictures of the lift from the rubble did what pictures do in a disaster that killed more than 50,000 people: they gave the living a single frame that was not only ruin. A cry under stone is not a balance sheet. It is only proof that, for 128 hours, one small body still had air.

Sources

Al Jazeera, “Mystery baby reunited with her mother 54 days after Turkey quakes,” April 3, 2023
Reuters, reunion of Vetin Begdas and Yasemin Begdas after DNA confirmation, April 2023
Contemporaneous Turkish and international reporting of the 128-hour Hatay rescue, February 11, 2023