Considered as one of the worst disasters of the century, the earthquakes that flattened a swathe of Turkish towns and cities have brought along a massive challenge: Sheltering hundreds of thousands of people left homeless in the middle of winter.
Banks of tents are being erected in stadiums and shattered city centres, and Mediterranean and Aegean summer beach resorts outside the quake zone are opening up hotel rooms for evacuees.
With some 6,500 buildings collapsed and countless more damaged, hundreds of thousands of people lack safe housing.
Syrian refugee Bahjat Selo, 62, and his family have camped near their cinderblock, cement and corrugated metal home in Kahramanmaraş since the quake caused cracks in its walls.
"It’s too dangerous to be inside. When we go in to get things, we go in like thieves," he told Reuters.
"We spent four years in a camp, and this is harder. It’s so dark," he said, his voice cracking and breaking into sobs.
At a tent city set up in a stadium in Kahramanmaraş, long lines of bedraggled residents queued up to receive steaming kebabs and dug through bags of donated warm clothing.
Volunteer air worker Fatma Nacar, 25, said she was helping out despite losing her aunt and several nephews to the quake.
"After we buried them, we came here to work as volunteers," she said, adding aid was arriving slowly due to blocked roads.
The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) calculates that more than 28,000 homeless people have been evacuated from the quake zone so far, with nearly 5,000 leaving by road and more than 23,000 by air.
Hotels welcome survivors
In the Aegean resort region of Marmaris, the owner of the Cettia Beach Hotel has opened up his hotel for quake survivors.
"My hotel is closed in winter and it was scheduled to open by April with the onset of summer season. We were renovating the hotel but we will stop and open up the hotel next week," said owner Bülent Bülbüloğlu.
The Turkish Hoteliers Federation (TÜROFED) told Reuters thousands of rooms had been allocated in resorts such as Antalya, Alanya, Marmaris, Fethiye, Bodrum as well as Izmir and Cappadocia.
"Hotels in Antalya welcomed their first guests from the disaster zone by Wednesday morning," said Ülkay Atmaca, head of the Professional Hotel Managers' Association (POYD).
Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said the government was doing all it could to provide temporary accommodation to survivors who wanted to be re-housed.
He told reporters that 15,729 people had been accommodated in state guesthouses, student dormitories and hotels, while in Antalya alone, 11,165 evacuees were lodged in hotels.
But with thousands of people still buried under piles of rubble, many survivors appeared unwilling to leave the region despite the freezing weather.
"We have allocated rooms in our hotels but we see that many survivors do not want to come now, because they are still waiting for their family or friends to be rescued from rubble," said Hakan Saatçioğlu, coordinator of Limak International Hotels & Resorts, which operates four hotels in Antalya.
The death toll from 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude quakes, Türkiye's deadliest since 1999, rose to more than 17,400 on Thursday.