The place cruise ships went to die

In all, more than 40 cruise ships had reported instances throughout the first six months of 2020, and the world’s cruise ship fleet step by step stopped operations, leaving as many as 40,000 crew stranded, sometimes in isolation.

Keeping a cruise ship in port with no paying passengers nonetheless incurs nice prices for the operators, says Bektas, so that they “decided to dismantle the ships somehow, especially the ones that are not too neat, that are not new enough”.

Aliağa, says Bektas, was already well-known to Turks, partly due to ongoing issues around safety and pollution at the site. “The working conditions are hard, tough,” he says. By October 2020, a number of the ships had already arrived on the port, and Bektas bought a tip-off from a good friend who was an area journalist.

But getting near the ships to take pictures wasn’t simple. “There is an association of these business owners of this shipyard,” he says. “I went to them and I asked for permission, and they said, ‘No’, they didn’t let me to go inside. I never had the chance to go inside and look from a close place.”

What Bektas did have entry to, nevertheless, was a drone. “We just started to use it, and at that time news pictures with drones is not that common,” he says. “The picture from drone is really on the aesthetical side. It creates a really nice picture.”