Posted on November 2, 2025
By Stephen Dowling
When Covid-19 took hold, cruise ship operators struggled to stay afloat. One option was to scrap older vessels – giving one photographer a unique perspective.
As Covid-19 spread at the start of 2020, the modern, globalised economy began to shudder to a halt.
Shops shut their doors. Factory production lines grew silent. The world’s vast armada of airliners stayed stationary in quiet airports – at least for the most part. And the cruise ship industry started to close down operations to avoid spreading the disease.
But Covid-19 spread remorselessly. Within weeks the cruise industry faced the spectre of much more serious challenges.
By March, anxiety over cancelled cruises was replaced with the very real possibility of entire cruise lines going under unless they could cut costs. One of the simplest ways to do this was to prune their fleets – by sending the oldest ships to the scrapyard.
Breaking down large ships is a complex and dangerous job that mostly takes place in the developing world, in places like the vast shipbreaking yard in Chittagong in Bangladesh. But one of the busiest places it’s done is in Turkey, on the tourist-baked azure coast near Izmir. Aliağa Ship Breaking Yard is the fourth-largest facility in the world, and as the effect of cancelled cruises began to bite, it’s where many of the cruise companies sent their huge ships to die.
Umit Bektas, a Turkish Reuters photographer based in Istanbul, heard that some of the ships were making their way to Aliağa. He knew that a picture of the ships awaiting destruction would make for a powerful image. “On the human side, there were lots of pictures, you know, people in the hospital, places like mass graves,” he says. “We shot a lot of pictures about how the shops are closed, but you cannot say that is it because of the curfew or is it because of the [Covid] crisis. But these ships are something that shows that this pandemic is affecting business.”
At the start of the Covid crisis, the plight of cruise ship passengers was of particular interest to the world’s media, Bektas says. In early 2020, the discovery of Covid cases on the British-registered ship Diamond Princess led to it being quarantined off the coast of Japan for two weeks. Before the ship could be evacuated, more than 700 passengers and crew were thought to have contracted the disease – nearly one in five of those on board – with as many as 14 of them dying.
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.”
Turkey, however, is not the easiest country in the world to fly a drone, he says, especially in areas close to military sites or sensitive installations. “It’s illegal to shoot in most of the places in Turkey with a drone, but this place is not that ‘strategic’ or something like that. So I fly it easily, but I don’t fly too much.”
He spent only around half an hour with colleagues on top of a hill overlooking the shipyard, he says.
“We published the picture immediately, and it really creates a big effect, and it’s published widely,” he says. He had no idea at the time that his drone-taken shot – with the huge, brightly coloured cruise ships lined up to await their fate – was one of the first pictures published of the cruise ship “cemetery”.
