The Cruise Ship Graveyard Caused by Covid

In all, more than 40 cruise ships had reported cases during the first six months of 2020, and the world's cruise ship fleet gradually stopped operations, leaving as many as 40,000 crew stranded, sometimes in isolation.

Keeping a cruise ship in port with no paying passengers still incurs great costs for the operators, says Bektas, so 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 because of ongoing issues around safety and pollution at the site. "The working conditions are hard, tough," he says. By October 2020, some of the ships had already arrived at the port, and Bektas got a tip-off from a friend who was a local journalist.

But getting close to the ships to take photographs wasn't easy. "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 access to, however, 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."