On the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Tetinana Spravnykova hid in a shelter underground in the southeastern Mariupol oblast under siege, and didn’t see the light of day until 32 harrowing days later. Her hometown was occupied, collapsing under the strain of siege.
“There was no way out,” she remembers. Sitting in a small knafeh shop in Mersin on the Mediterranean coast in Turkey’s south, she’s wearing black-framed eyeglasses that reveal distress in her gaze as she recalls the most frightening period of her life.
“They burned all of the houses. They burned all of the cars,” she recalls. “We were being bombarded from the Black Sea, and from Donetsk.”
The first chance she could, she grabbed her dog and cat, got in her car, and took in a woman she didn’t know along with her daughter, and drove to Kyiv. She stayed there, living in a world of sirens and uncertainty by herself for two years, as her son and husband decided to stay abroad.
Then, they found Mersin to start their new lives. “I didn’t think twice before coming here,” Spravnykova, a 52-year-old housewife, says. “I’m a Kazan Tatar, and I didn’t even consider going to Europe. Turks had opened mosques in Mariupol, and we felt part of the community.”
The horror of those days pose a stark contrast with where she now lives in sunny tranquility with her son and husband. Mersin, a calm, slow summer city, she says, is “heaven.” Overlooking the northern Mediterranean Sea, the city’s ancient layers of history blend with its modern-day charm, making it both a haven and a bustling port for people seeking a fresh start.
Mersin has been inhabited at least since 6300 BC, excavations at Yumuktepe, which revealed 23 layers of occupation, show. In its vast history, Hittites, Assyrians, Urartians, Persians and Greeks have lived here among others. In 1518, it became part of the Ottoman Empire, which precedes modern-day Turkey.
In modern times, its population continues to boom in the summertime, thanks to its 321-kilometer sand beaches, laid-back city feel and a sense of second home. Families living in the ever-fertile Çukurova plain, which covers Mersin, Adana, and parts of Osmaniye and Hatay on its east, traditionally buy or rent summer houses, what Turks call “yazlık,” here.
Many wake up to the view of the sea, shifting tapestry that changes with the sun, capturing hues between teal and deep sapphire – and finish the day having seen a palm tree. The banana from its Anamur district in the west is world-famous, and its local delicacy tantuni is at every corner.
The port city, which has a brand new airport, a marina, an opera house and five universities, houses nearly two million residents. Most of its inhabitants are made up of locals of the region, of Kurds who migrated from the southeastern provinces since the ‘90’s due to poverty and the conflict between the Turkish state and the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, as well as the Syrian refugees, who began migrating to Turkey after the civil war broke out in 2011.
After the Russian invasion began, more than 50,000 Ukrainians arrived in Turkey, Turkish Statistical Institute data shows. Nearly 2,000 of them arrived in Mersin.
Angelina Hurtova is one. From Kryvi Rih in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast in central Ukraine, she hopped in her car and left her life and husband behind as the Russian army was advancing towards the capital, Kyiv.
Her mother, father and children had rented a summer apartment in Mersin for one year, starting in January. When the war began, her family was torn apart. Her father and daughters were back in Ukraine, and her husband, who works as a repairman, was also at home.
“We waited for a few days, but on Feb. 28, the Russians came 30 kilometers near us,” she remembers. “So, I took the children and three of my siblings, and we headed to Turkey.”
She hadn’t been to Mersin before, but like many Europeans, she had been to the touristic hotspots of Antalya and Alanya, just west of Mersin. Although many have left by now, some 50,000 Russians and around 18,000 Ukrainians fled to Antalya after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to official statistics – and in 2023, more than 3.4 million Russians arrived in Antalya as tourists. The prices of basic goods and housing are well above average.
“It’s cheaper, and everyone speaks Turkish here. It’s not like that in Antalya. We wanted Turkish culture, so we came here,” Hurtova says. Explaining that she’s already making lahmacun, known as the thin-crust Turkish pizza, and kavurma, sliced fried meat, she is warmly surprised by how accustomed she has become in two and a half years.
Her worries about daily life are similar to a Turk’s today, living under a crushing 88 percent inflation, according to Turkey’s private Inflation Research Group, ENAG, without support. “We used to be able to buy red meat once a week two years ago; now we buy it once a month.”
The education prices, she says, are so high that her 10-years-old daughter cannot go to school in Turkey, but continues her education in Ukraine remotely – although they have no plans of going back anytime soon. Her younger daughter is enrolled in a public Turkish school.
She speaks Turkish – broken, but explanatory. She has learned the skill, socializing and working in a knafeh shop by the sea and simultaneously in the real estate office next to it. Out of about ten shops, there are three small businesses with signs that are marked with the Kryl alphabet.

“A lot of my friends from my hometown came to Mersin, and I helped them find apartments,” Hurtova says, smiling. Her customers at the real estate office are mostly Ukrainian and Russian, she adds. Following a hike after the invasion, the arrivals have slowed down by now, she tells.
But the Ukrainian crew in Mersin is already enough to keep a sense of home alive, abroad, in their new chapter. They get together once a week, eat and talk about their lives. And although every meeting is a joyful gathering, the topic comes to the war somehow: “How many bombs, how many killed… We talk about these. We’re far, but not that far,” Hurtova says.
Meanwhile, Tetyana Gayduk, a 52-year-old painter from Odessa is facing the impact of war, about a thousand miles away everyday. Her nine-year-old daughter Maria is stressed out all the time, Gayduk tells, her voice trembling. “There was an explosion next to my house, and I fled to save my daughter,” she says.
Their journey to Mersin the month after the invasion began was tough: They took one of the evacuation buses from Odessa on the southern coast of Ukraine on the Black Sea, but Maria, who has asthma, was very sick. “It was traumatizing,” she says. “I didn’t go out the first year we moved here because I was stressed out all the time.”
Her mother, who is 78-years-old, won’t be able to leave Ukraine, she pleads. “And I can’t go because of the bombs, as I have a daughter. Who knows who will see the next day in Ukraine?”
Using a translator on her phone, she tells the story of how she herself transformed from a naturalistic painter to one who portrays glorified Ukrainian women once the invasion began. “I will spend my life telling the war crimes Russia’s committing,” she says with decisiveness.
Last month, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), drawing on intelligence and unnamed sources, reported a sobering figure: approximately one million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or injured since the conflict started. Most of the fatalities are soldiers from both sides, with Ukrainian civilians accounting for the next largest group.
Government data shows that, in the first half of 2024, deaths in Ukraine outnumbered births by a ratio of three to one, as reported by the WSJ.
The ongoing war continues to impact millions of Ukrainians, with 6.5 million recorded as refugees globally, and 3.7 million internally displaced, out of Ukraine’s population of 38 million, according to UNHCR. Poland has welcomed the highest number of Ukrainian refugees, UNHCR notes, housing 60 percent, of which 90 percent are women and children.
“We are so sad to see them in these conditions,” Nuri Öztunç, the 42-year-old owner of the knafeh shop, says. “We see them struggling economically, and it saddens us.”
But despite the pressing conditions, some Ukrainians, like Anna Ballı, found their silver lining here. The 24-year-old cafe owner in Mersin arrived here one week after the war began and married a Turkish man she met on social media soon after.
She’s also from Odessa, and her older brother is now fighting with the Ukrainian Defense Forces in Kursk, in Russia. Her entire family is back in Ukraine, and her mind is not completely absent from it. But in the small coffee shop she opened a year ago, she’s trying to focus on a reality that doesn’t involve ruthless destruction.
“I’m happy in Mersin,” she says, adding that she has no plans of moving back. “The Mediterranean made me happy.”