Earthquakes shattering lives in Turkey: "It feels like yesterday"

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

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

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

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

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.