In the Turkish town of Pazarcik, a soccer pitch has been turned into a burial ground for people killed by the earthquake which struck 11 days ago. The goal posts are still standing but the field is dotted with about 100 dirt mounds and ditches.

Each freshly dug grave is topped with a wooden plank marking the same date of death - Feb. 6, 2023 - when this town was devastated by the deadliest earthquake in Turkey's modern history.

"We waited...for 10 days to get the bodies of the deceased from under the rubble," said Huseyin Akis, who was burying his niece along with her husband and two sons.

The scene in Pazarcik, epicentre of the quake that struck in the dead of night on Feb. 6, captured the struggle facing people trying to find and bury their dead since the disaster, which has killed more than 43,000 in Turkey and neighboring Syria.

At a graveyard in Kahramanmaras, thousands of new graves vastly outnumbered those which predated the earthquake, underlining the scale of the catastrophe.

Tents had been erected to perform Islamic burial rituals, and to wrap the bodies in a shroud. Empty coffins, sent from all over Turkey, were piled high. A Muslim cleric stood ready to perform the rituals.

People carried bodies in bags towards graves. The sound of prayer recitations competed with the noise of excavators digging more ditches in the distance.

According to Islamic traditions, the dead should be buried as quickly as possible, if not immediately.

Speaking at the Kahramanmaras cemetery this week, the deputy head of Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate described the difficulties in burying bodies recovered from the rubble, noting their condition sometimes meant rituals must be adapted.

"No one should think that what is necessary is not being done. Look here: our friends carried out around 10,000 burials. It is not possible to spend hours on each one, so the process is carried out in a sped up way," the official, Burhan İşleyen, said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster A Haber.

Authorities have grappled with the problem of retrieving bodies and preparing them for burial since the earthquake, said Bulent Tekbiyikoglu, the governor of the city of Kirikkale, who was on a visit to Pazarcik.

Ghassals - who prepare bodies for burial in accordance with Islamic rituals - had been working "in rotation as hundreds of bodies piled up at once", he added.

Some families have worked with crime scene investigators to identify their dead relatives.

(With input from Reuters)