Preface

My interest in Kanlı Pazar — the 1969 Istanbul massacre — began as a student in the Department of Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. The undergraduate thesis I completed in 2008 was about eighty pages long. When the possibility of publishing it as a book came up in 2012, I revisited the text: I added new sources, spent long stretches tracking down material in secondhand bookshops, and combed the archives again. By the time it became a book, the work had grown to roughly two hundred pages.

In the years since, it has become clearer that Kanlı Pazar is not merely an event that belongs to the past. How it is remembered and retold, which of its facets are made visible and which fade over time, have become as much a part of the research as the event itself. New testimonies, television programs, documentaries, newspaper archives, pamphlets, photographs, and statements made years later all made it necessary to reopen this work.

For that reason, what you are reading is no longer just a republication of the 2012 book. It has been reconceived as an open-ended field of research — one that expands with new documents and testimonies, and that tries to make visible its own gaps, omissions, and contradictions. A printed book is finished at a given moment; a digital format, by contrast, allows the work to develop over time, to be transformed by new additions, and to be discussed anew.

Debates about Kanlı Pazar have too often been reduced to a clash between two opposing political camps. But the event should be considered within a broader historical context — one that stretches from the organizational forms of anticommunism in Turkey to the social legitimation of political violence, from the use of religious discourse for political mobilization to the polarization of youth movements. This work tries to bring that context into focus, and to trace, on a documentary basis, the relationships among the period's different actors.

The new material added to this digital edition is not merely "supplementary information." Some documents call into question narratives repeated for years; some testimonies require rethinking different facets of the event. In particular, self-critical statements made in later years open up new areas of debate about the political atmosphere of the period. For this reason, the work tries not only to record a past event, but also to trace how social memory is shaped, how it is transformed, and by what mechanisms it is reproduced.

I owe thanks to everyone who contributed along the way — with criticism, with documents, or with support for the work's development. The contributions of the teachers and friends I thanked in the earlier edition remain among the foundations of this work. The researchers, readers, and archive contributors who have joined in this new phase now hold an important place in its development as well.

Any shortcomings and errors in this work are entirely my own. But as I wrote in the preface years ago, every piece of research is also a road, and that road never fully ends. This edition should be understood as part of that ongoing search.

I dedicate this work to everyone working to dispel the fog that obscures the truth, and to ensure that suffering like this is never repeated.