(The author is a Seattle native who moved to Istanbul in January of 2006. This is his sixth posting; find all of his reports on his author page.)

People get ready: Protesters gathered on Siraselviler Saturday night, Taksim Square in the distance.
  • Ned Entrikin
  • People get ready: Protesters gathered on Siraselviler Saturday night, Taksim Square in the distance.

This weekend the situation in Istanbul changed dramatically.

Around 8:45pm on Saturday my wife called me to let me know that Gezi Park was being cleared by the police. I packed our breathing masks, goggles and bandanas, plus a pair of her tennis shoes and a permanent marker, in a backpack and headed out the door to meet her. She was in a bar on Nevizade Sokak, the famous bar street just off of Istiklal Caddesi, the main thoroughfare through Beyoglu. On the way to the bar, I was surprised at how many people continued to casually drink their beers, seemingly unaware or unconcerned with what was happening. Inside the bar, I watched a few minutes of news footage on the TV of bulldozers entering the park and then of police on foot systematically checking tents to see if anyone was left inside.

Later, I learned that many of the Gezi Park Occupiers fled to the Divan Hotel, just across the street from the park. The fleeing protesters were pursued into the hotel, where police (whose ID numbers had been whited out on their helmets), removed the protesters’ breathing masks and confiscated their mixtures of antacid and water, leaving them unprepared for the tear gas which would inevitably follow.



Having left Nevizade, donned our masks, and written our blood types on our forearms, we moved up Istiklal into a group of what looked like 10,000 people facing the entrance to Taksim Square, which had been blocked by the police. We bought a pair of construction helmets from a vendor on the street and joined the rest in their shouts of “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism” and the other slogans which have become popular over the past two weeks. It wasn’t long before the first tear gas was launched into the crowd, seemingly from a side street, which led many of us to escape down the street opposite it. The feeling of so many people moving on all sides of you amid the shouts of “Stay calm!” and “Slow down!” is even more terrifying than the tear gas itself. Each time someone runs ahead of you, you feel that you need to move faster.

The crowd on Istiklal had been divided, and further divisions occurred as we moved further from the main street. Anyone who has been to Istanbul knows the streets are labrynthine, leaving choice after choice of streets to run down. We came to another large crowd at the head of Siraselviler Caddesi, which also opens onto Taksim Square. At the explosive sounds of more tear gas being shot off further away, a few of us began dismantling a construction scaffolding and massive sheets of ¾ inch-thick plywood to use as a barricade, despite the resistance of a shop-owner across the street. Siraselviler is a main corridor for ambulances, as there are two major hospitals on the street, so we moved the materials to the one street that directly connects Istiklal to Siraselviler, but before we could finish our work, the police had fired more tear gas, and we had to fall back again. Half the crowd descended a steep hill to a windy street which links the center of the Cihangir neighborhood to the midpoint of Istiklal. A number of people who come from the opposite direction were standing confusedly, and at least one had been badly gassed. It occurred to me that because so many people had come from across town to protest here, many of them were not familiar with the neighborhood and didn’t know where to go.

There were other perils than the police that night, including reports of AKP supporters in the conservative neighborhood of Tophane, just below us, waiting for protesters with döner knives and clubs in hand. My wife and I led this group down the set of stairs behind the old Galatasaray Turkish bath into the neighborhood of Cukurcuma. Several more went in the wrong direction, despite our warnings about Tophane. We got our group as far as the very edge of Cihangir, which we figured would be safe and would offer more escape routes, only to be met by a group of cops at the top of the slope leading to Cihangir Square, who launched tear gas at us. The situation appeared hopeless and the last of our group ran away. We found our way to our own apartment, not far away, and took a bewildered-looking young couple inside to take refuge from the gas until things calmed down. When we walked them up to a spot where they could catch a taxi home an hour later, we found one shop making money hand-over-fist selling beer to worn-out protesters in what seemed a tacit “fuck you” to the new ban on selling alcohol after 10pm.

By morning, Twitter, Facebook and the couple of reliable news channels were full of awful images, including a questionable photo of a man stuck under a police TOMA, reports of tear gas shot into the German Hospital in Cihangir, and most disturbingly, several people who had been arrested but had not arrived at any of the city’s police stations according to those who had tried to track them down. In addition to all this was a teenage boy who was shot in the head that morning, though accounts differ considerably as to what he was shot with, his exact age, and whether he was involved in the protests or merely a bystander.

Sunday afternoon two competing “meetings” took place. At 4:00 one million people were called to converge on Taksim Square. The numbers are impossible to say, but people poured across the Bosphorus Bridge from the Asian side of Istanbul, all ferry traffic having been shut down. In fact, the only public transportation that was working were buses to Prime Minister Erdogan’s “Respect for the National Will Meeting” across town in the district of Fatih. One million people were expected to attend Erdogan's speech, though the venue only has room for a maximum of 300,000 and from overhead shots was clearly not packed to capacity. The speech was full of the same rhetoric he has been using since the protests began, telling his supporters that they are the actual public, that the people in Gezi Park were terrorists, and then turning all the criticisms the Turkish people have made of him back at the protesters. He claimed that he was “more green” than his opponents, among other things.

Most of the speech was founded on lies, the most outrageous one being his account of the Dolmabahce mosque (mentioned in my third post) which served as a makeshift hospital for wounded protesters one night. “They entered with their shoes on,” said the PM, “and drank alcohol… for three nights.” How this story, which has been refuted by the mosque’s müezzin who was present that night, has continued to grow more fabulistic in nature is indicative of all the lies propogated by the AK Party. The speech did have an unfortunate effect, which I can only hope was not calculated by Erdogan, which was that afterwards, AKP supporters both broke into the offices of their chief rival, CHP, and took to the streets in protest of the protests. Surely no responsible head of state would pit his own people against one another.