Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday made a speech at a ceremony held in Şanlıurfa for the groundbreaking of post-disaster houses and key handover of newly-built houses.

Speaking at a ceremony held in Şanlıurfa for the groundbreaking of post-disaster houses and key handover of newly-built houses, Erdoğan said: “We have achieved a century’s worth of progress in democracy and development in our country over the past 21 years. Thus, we have managed to remove in record time the traces of all the disasters that took place.”

Stating that thanks to the works they had commenced following the earthquakes, constructions of the new houses had started to rise, Erdoğan said: “We will inshallah revive our earthquake zone by building 650,000 houses, 319,000 of which we will handover within a year. As a matter of fact, we will deliver the first-phase of the newly-built village houses to their owners in Eid al-Fitr.”

“We have achieved a century’s worth of progress in democracy and development in our country over the past 21 years,” Erdoğan stressed, and added: “Thus, we have managed to remove in record time the traces of all the disasters that took place. It is with this understanding that we have not kneeled under the burden of the earthquakes that are described as ‘the disaster of century’ by scientists and as ‘small doomsday’ by those who experienced them. Obviously, we not only build houses while reviving our cities collapsed in the earthquakes. We are building new cities, so to speak, with all their schools, hospitals, infrastructures, parks and workplaces. In this sense, we will build 11,000 houses, 8,000 of them residences and 3,000 village houses, in Şanlıurfa, and make our earthquake victims move in their new homes.”. (ILKHA)