Banda Aceh, Indonesia: Grieving relatives gathered on beaches and at mass graves on Sunday to remember the more than 216,000 people killed or washed away by the tsunami that crashed into coastlines from Asia to Africa one year ago.
As final preparations were made for official commemoration ceremonies on Monday marking one year to the day since the disaster, mourners held mostly small, quiet prayer gatherings of their own on the anniversary's eve.
Western tourists, who survived the tsunami, were among those who returned to the rebuilt resorts in Thailand to remember family and friends who did not.
In India, children dressed in white marched down a street where thousands were washed away.
In Indonesia's worst-hit Aceh province, some survivors went to a mass grave where the unidentified bodies of almost 47,000 victims are buried many of them to mourn loved ones who simply vanished in the waves.
"After I come here I somehow feel satisfied," said Dasniati, who travelled 15 hours to lay petals on the grave at Lamboro, outside the devastated provincial capital of Banda Aceh.
She believes the body of her 10-year-old daughter, Yaul, was among the thousands dumped into pits at Lamboro in the days immediately after the December 26 tragedy, when officials were desperate to clear the streets of thousands of corpses.
"I pray that Allah accepts her at his side," she said.
Countries left reeling by the 10-metre-high waves sent crashing ashore in 12 countries by a magnitude-9 undersea earthquake off Indonesia's coast were preparing to mark the anniversary with official ceremonies and a minute's silence today.
At 7:58am local time on December 26 last year the Earth's crust deep under the ocean off the west coast of Banda Aceh province shifted, violently lifting the seabed.
The megathrust, the world's biggest earthquake in 40 years with a magnitude of 9.3, sent shockwaves through the Indian Ocean, unleashing waves up to 15 metres high that raced towards the shores of 12 nations.
The giant walls of water smashed into coastlines, destroying vast swathes of land, swallowing villages and razing buildings from Indonesia to India and Sri Lanka to Thailand. Six hours later they even hit Africa.
The waves wrought devastation as never before. Around 216,000 people were killed, almost two million left homeless and economic damage ran to billions of dollars.
No one saw them coming, but by the end of the day the whole world knew their name: tsunami.
Behind the staggering statistics were heartrending tales of human tragedy and misery children orphaned, babies plucked from their parent's grasp, entire families wiped out.
Such was the scale of the catastrophe that it prompted an unprecedented global relief operation and triggered an outpouring of aid on a scale never before seen, with billions of dollars pledged.
But one year on, the recovery task remains massive. In Aceh, more than 60,000 people still huddle in tents, while hundreds of thousands wait for new homes to be built here, as do tens of thousands in Sri Lanka and neghbouring India.
"Are we happy with the progress in Aceh? No we are not, at all. There are still 60,000 people in tents today and that's clearly unacceptable a year after the tsunami," Andrew Steer, the World Bank's Indonesia country director, said this week.
