Almost all the employees lost their homes, the accountant and the veterinarian disappeared with their families. But in the Turkish province of Hatay, devastated by the February earthquake, the “silk of peace” is reweaving ties.
“I had to motivate myself to leave,” admits Emel Duman, 57, stretching between her fingers a small ivory ball of incredible softness. These yellow cocoons, which allow him to spin and weave natural silk, are the project of a lifetime.
Her house destroyed, she lives with her family in her cooperative on the heights of Antakya, where a hundred people huddled after the disaster who had lost everything, but survived the earthquake which killed at least 50,000 people in the south. from Turkey.
“Apart from the workshop, everything collapsed. It’s hard to leave,” she says.
Before the disaster, the Apollon cooperative, located above Antakya, employed around 70 people, mostly women who often worked from home. Only a handful have returned, including the fashion designer who settled there after losing his home.
When Emel Duman started 25 years ago, the province of Hatay, bordering Syria on one of the ancient silk roads, lost its know-how: we still weave there but the cocoons, white, are imported from China.
But Hatay’s cocoon, it’s her specificity, is yellow, insists Emel who ended up finding the last breeder of endemic bombyx mori, which have become her obsession: her husband, Fikret, assures us that she speaks to them.
“It’s like for plant species, we have to fight against the loss of biodiversity,” she says.
On an arid and stony ground, she planted with her husband the first vines of mulberry trees, fragile and demanding shrubs that they water day and night, transporting the water by truck to the digging of a well.
Today, its 15,000 trees allow it to feed thousands of white grubs, reared in the shade on large wooden trays: listening, you hear the fresh leaves crackle as they devour.
“An orchestral symphony, the most beautiful music in the world”, smiles Fikret Duman who has just spread a new thick layer of freshly picked foliage.
Patient, Emel Duman lets nature act and the worm mutate into a caterpillar, pierce the cocoon he has made and which imprisons him and finally fly away like a butterfly.
It was while working with sericulture experts from Mustafa Kemal University in Hatay and others from Izmir (west) that she learned the appropriate term, from India, for this painlessly produced silk: ” the silk of peace”.
“Industry scalding the cocoon to kill the worm,” she explains.
In his cooperative, “we get 1,400 to 1,700 meters of silk from each cocoon”, says his daughter Tugce, 32, a graduate in textile science and design. “But we cannot use it entirely because of the hole which damages the filaments”.
Silk gradually declined in the province after the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. However, Emel remembers, in the past, for their wedding, young girls still received their silk trousseau.
Devastated by the February 6 earthquake – ‘so strong I thought there were no survivors’ – in which she lost nephews and cousins, then taken over by needy families crying out for help, Emel Duman struggles to restart production.
She received support from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which was already referring Syrian refugees to her, many of whom contacted her to return.
And she has already applied for a controlled designation to protect “Hatay Peace Silk.”
According to the UN Development Program (UNDP), which supports a recruitment campaign for women, 350,000 people were employed in nearly 3,000 clothing and textile companies in the provinces devastated by the February 6 earthquake. : figures halved now.
28/07/2023 18:29:47 – Antakya (Turquie) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
