Before the earthquake, Abdullah Senel had nerves of steel. But these days, just being inside a house makes him nervous – and it only takes the sound of a plane flying overhead to put him on edge.

"I was fearless in the past, but now a single noise is enough to freak me out," the 57-year-old former weightlifter told Agence France Presse (AFP).

"Everything reminds me of the earthquake – even the sound of a plane," he said.

Last month's devastating 7.7 and 7.6 magnitude earthquakes flattened entire cities, killing more than 50,000 people across southeastern Türkiye and parts of northern Syria.

In Kahramanmaraş, a Turkish city near the quake's epicentre, survivors remain haunted by the trauma one month on.

"It's been a month now but for me, it feels like yesterday," said Adem Serin as he watched heavy machines remove piles of rubble in the complex of high-rises where hundreds lost their lives.

"We couldn't get over the shock. I was caught by the quake on the 11th floor of a high-rise building. I can still hear the screams of people crying for help on every floor. This pain will never go away," said Serin, whose wife is five months pregnant.

Efforts to remove the ubiquitous rubble now dominate the city of 1.1 million people.

Workers who arrived from all over Türkiye spray water on debris, and rubble-laden trucks trundle along the road waiting to dump the waste into a landfill outside the city.

Clouds of dust

Columns of dust emerge from the clean-up cover the horizon, carried by the wind and generating grey clouds seen from kilometers away.

"Some 200 to 250 tons of debris is removed here daily, we are irrigating so that it will not disturb the environment and not generate dust," said Eren Genc, of the Forestry Directorate in the eastern Sivas province.

Operators sometimes come across precious objects while working to remove the rubble.

Levent Topal, from the waterworks authority in the Black Sea region, said his team spotted a safe deposit box in the rubble full of dollars, euros, gold and documents. "We never touch them, we deliver them to the police who find the owner," he said.

A 54-year-old man took a big risk and climbed to the seventh floor of his building to retrieve items – despite the danger and more than 11,000 aftershocks that followed the earthquake.

"I know it's risky," admitted Veli Akgoz as he loaded a door and curtain rods onto the roof of his car.

His entire family of 13 people, who used to live in five different flats, will now squeeze into a village house.

2 million homeless

Officials say nearly 2 million people, left homeless by the quake, are now housed in tents, container homes, guesthouses or dormitories in and beyond the region.

In one part of Kahramanmaraş offering a panoramic view of the city, a dozen tents are housed in the garden of a local authority's two-story offices. Locals cover the ground of the tents with carpets they pulled from a historic mosque whose minaret fell due to the quake.

The country's death toll from the quake has risen to 45,968, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Saturday. Soylu said the death toll includes 4,267 Syrians as well.

Turkish officials said 214,000 buildings collapsed following the quake, many of them in Hatay and Kahramanmaraş. Teams of workers are still striving to clear the rubble in the affected provinces.