‘I have never washed so many corpses in one day. We were exhausted’
Turkey’s ‘ghassals’ say at the height of Covid-19 they were preparing up to 40 bodies a day. They normally wash five
07 February 2022 - 19:45
Eda Elal has prepared corpses for burial in accordance with Islamic rituals for nearly half her life, but says her job as a “ghassal” in Turkey has never been harder than when bodies and illness overwhelmed her during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Elal, 36, said a sense of spiritual duty helped her continue to carry out the common end-of-life ritual despite exhaustion and fear, especially when she fell ill with Covid-19 last year...
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