Friday July 2, 1993. A host of Turkey’s writers, artists and musicians have convened at the Hotel Madimak in downtown Sivas in central Anatolia.

They are here at the hotel to celebrate the famed 16th Century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdan. Among those present is Asiz Nesin, a controversial Turkish writer and humorist. Recently Nesin has embarked on a Turkish translation of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.”

Throughout the city, locals are gathering at the mosques for the Friday noon prayer, or Jumu’uah. It is a special prayer that calls upon the faithful to leave off their work and to pray, and afterward to “seek the Bounty of Allah, and celebrate the Praises of Allah.”

Shortly after the noon prayer, a mob estimated at 15,000 people — “fundamental Islamists,” as the accounts later report, gather outside the Hotel Madimak. They are angered at the presence of Aziz Nesin.

“Death to the infidel!” the mob chants, threatening those inside the hotel with lynching if the writer is not handed over.

Suddenly the hotel is set alight, and within minutes the hotel is consumed in a blaze as angry as the shouts of the mob in the street. By the end of the afternoon, nearly 40 of the people inside the hotel will perish, including several hotel staff. Police, according to later news reports, who gather at the scene seem unable, or unwilling, to stop the violence.

The writer Aziz Nezin, miraculously, manages to escape. The angry mob initially failed to recognize him. His luck doesn’t save him entirely, for when his identity is discovered, a short time later, he is beaten by local firemen.
“This is the devil we really should have killed,” says Cafer Ercakmak, a city council member, from the Welfare Party.

****

Tuesday July 2, 2013. It’s a cool evening in Kadikoy, on Istanbul’s Asian side. Omer, my flatmate, returned the previous day from a 10-day business trip to Saudi Arabia. He’s brought back a package of dates, as well as some cigarettes, as gifts. We sit in the living room with the windows open to let in the Bosphorous breeze, and he talks about his trip.

“It’s really different from Turkey,” Omer says, chewing on a date. “It was really hot – like 50 degrees Celsius. The women everywhere (were) completely covered. Even their eyes, they have some kind of plastic covering. When I arrived back in Turkey, I said to myself (he engages in a phantom embrace), “Yes! I am home again!”

Suddenly sounds that have become very familiar over the summer drift up from the street below. Our other flatmate, Yusuf, a university student, joins us at the windows. Down in the street legions of protesters are streaming by. They clap their hands, wave signs marked “SIVAS” and chant in strident voices.

It occurred to me then, listening to the voices, that this year marks the 20th anniversary of the Sivas Massacre. But this year, apart from the milestone, there is a new, more powerful ingredient, an added flavor. What was it?
The chants of the protesters are mixed, alternating between remembering the Sivas Massacre, and – fast forwarding to the Gezi Park protests – calling on the current Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan to resign.

“SIVAS UNUTMAYIN! TAYYIP ISTIFA!

REMEMBER SIVAS! RESIGN TAYYIP!”

It might seem incongruous to some for the protesters to use the Sivas Massacre and the current prime minister in the same breath. After all, Erdogan was not even in power in 1993, and had nothing to do with what happened in Sivas.

No, just call it good, or bad, timing. It comes amid the ongoing protests in Taksim Square over the government’s plans to redevelop Gezi Park, which the protesters see as the final straw in a mounting list of grievances with Erdogan’s style of governing. As an aside, the protests also coincide with the anti-government demonstrations in Egypt, which culminated this past week with the removal of the country’s president Mohammed Morsi from office (in a military coup, by the way, sparked by public outcry over Morsi’s perceived “Islamist agenda”).

Finally, the protesters, have also continued the debate, here and throughout much of this part of the world, about the difficult relationship between democracy and Islam.

It took an estimated half hour for the demonstrators to pass. Many of them waved up at those of us watching and called upon us to join them (“Gel! Gel! Come! Come!”), but we didn’t. There could have been as many as 10,000 or more in the crowd, we couldn’t be sure. If some readers may wonder why I refer to the protesters here as a “crowd” rather than a “mob,” as I did in regards to the Sivas protesters, I do so because these protesters seemed to be peaceful. They were calling for resignation, not lynching.

“What happened at Sivas was terrible,” Omer reflected. “It is our shame.”

****

What is the link between the Sivas Massacre and the ongoing protests in Taksim Square?

The former is a tragedy in which an angry group of Islamists savagely assaulted a group of artists, who were merely exercising their right to Free Speech. The latter centers around fears by the Taksim Square protesters that an increasingly authoritarian government is attempting to impose a more conservative, Islamic order in a country that has been a secular democracy since its founding in 1923 by M. Kemal Ataturk.

Memories of the Sivas Massacre, these protesters seem to say, serve as a reminder of the dangers to secularism and free expression Islamic fundamentalism has posed in the past. Some fear that the heavy handed treatment of anti-government protesters in Taksim Square could be a harbinger of new threats on the horizon.

Postscript. In the aftermath of the Sivas Massacre, nearly 200 people were eventually detained, charged with “attempting to establish a religious state by changing the Constitutional order.” Of those charged, 33 were eventually sentenced to death (the sentences were commuted to life in prison in 2002 when Turkey got rid of the death penalty), while others received lesser sentences.

The hotel Madimak has since re-opened and is now a museum.

Writer Asiz Nisan, died two years after the Sivas Massacre. His survivors say that the writer never got over the tragedy, and felt responsible for the lives lost.

James Tressler was a reporter for The Times-Standard. His books, including “Conversations in Prague,” and “The Trumpet Fisherman and Other Istanbul Sketches,” are available at Amazon.com and Lulu.com. He lives in Istanbul.