“Shit, how are we going to get home?” I asked Omer. On Twitter, we saw that the authorities had just shut down all public transport. We were sitting in a café in Nevizade Pasaj on Istikklal Caddesi.

“Wait,” Omer said, checking again. “Oh,” he said, relieved. “They just cut off access to the European side. The Asian side is still open.”

The announcement was hardly surprising. Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the Taksim Square protests, which made news around the world last summer. It was on this day that a small group of people gathered near Gezi Park, which is located near the square, to protest plans to develop part of the park into a shopping center. The police’s heavy-handed crackdown – using tear gas and, later, water cannons – sparked the arrival of what would become tens of thousands protesters within a matter of hours.

At the time when the Gezi Park/Taksim Square protests started last summer, I was having dinner with a student and his family across the city in a neighborhood called Bostanci. We were in the middle of Turkish coffee and dessert when a spontaneous neighborhood protest began, a show of solidarity with the protesters. All around the neighborhood, people began clicking their lights on and off, and the windows blinked like eyes in the twilight. Others blew police whistles, clapped their hands, and banged pots and pans.

Such things became nightly events last summer, as the protesters set up camps in Gezi Park and battled the police. We sat glued, listening to the latest updates. Each evening around 9 o’clock, thousands of demonstrators would pass outside in the street near our flat. Omer and I would open the windows and watch as they passed, waving the red-and-white Turkish flag, and calling on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to resign.

All of that happened last summer. A year on, Erdogan and his ruling AK Party were still in power, having won a sweeping re-election this past April, despite the Taksim Square protests, and despite lingering investigations into corruption within Erdogan’s party – allegations that reach the highest levels. One year on, and not only as the AK Party kept control of the country, but it has even cracked down on social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube (a Twitter ban was later lifted; the YouTube ban persists despite a recent high court ruling that said the ban was unconstitutional).

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Police guard the entrance to Gezi Park By Omer Seckin.

Last summer, Omer and I made a couple trips to Gezi Park, to check out the protests firsthand. It was like visiting Woodstock, with mostly students (but not only students, people of all ages) camped out in tents, resting by day until the nightly protests began. In the park there was a Revolution Market, handing out free food and water, as well as a free library and make-shift medical center to attend those injured in the frenzied, tumultous clashes. In some ways, it brought back memories of covering anti-PL (and later, anti-Iraq war) protests back in Humboldt County.

Yesterday morning, knowing that it was the one-year anniversary, I’d texted Omer on Facebook asking if he wanted to return to Taksim.

“Sure, why not?” he wrote.

My girlfriend Ozge was working at Dolmabahce Palace that afternoon. I messaged her just to let her know our plans. “Be careful,” she wrote.

We met at the Uskudar ferry station, and crossed over to Besiktas. In the news, we had read that Erdogan, in a speech on Friday, had strongly warned against people going to Taksim Square on Saturday. Some 25,000 police had been ordered to effectively prevent any protests in the square to mark the anniversary. I’d read some of the speech, in which the prime minister was addressing a group of winners of an essay-writing contest commemorating the 561st anniversary of the conquering of Istanbul by Ottoman Turks.

Erdogan told the students the original Arab meaning of “conquer” does not mean “to usurp or oppress,” but rather “to open.”

“Violence is where there is no thought and opinion,” Erdogan was reported as saying. The Gezi people are those who have no thought. They never planted a tree. You won’t become such youth. You’ll speak with your pen.” The subject of the essay contest was “Conquest Spirit, [Sultan Mehmed] the Conqueror and Youth.”

When we arrived in Besiktas, the police presence was seen and felt immediately. Groups of armed, uniformed officers were set up everywhere, and we also saw armored vehicles, fire trucks, even tractors. We even saw some plain-clothesmen packing riot batons in back packs.

We decided to get a bus, which took us up the hill past where the new football stadium was being built. But at the top of the hill, the driver had everyone get out. The buses were not going all the way to Taksim. So we got out and walked the rest of the way.

As we passed Istanbul Technical University, which is on the way up to the square, Omer and I reflected on making the same trip last summer. Now, it was a markedly different scene.

“It was like a war-zone, remember?” I asked. We recalled how the protesters had torn up the bricks in the streets and constructed make-shift barricades, and how anti-government graffitti had been spray-painted everywhere.

“Yes,” Omer said, “Remember that door that they put up? And how we walked through that door? We said, ‘We are entering the New Turkey.’”

Yes, it had felt that way, last summer. You felt like it was like Turkey’s Summer of Love. Even the nearby hotels – five-star hotels – had opened up their doors to allow protesters to use the toilets. One man had proposed to his girlfriend on the Square during the protests, and she accepted to great cheers. On another occasion, a German composer performed live on the square a song called “Light Soldiers,” which he had written for the Gezi Park demonstrators. A video of the performance went viral on the Internet.

All of these images and memories went through our heads as we continued up the hill to Taksim. İt was about 2 o’clock, and the streets were fairly quiet, especially for a Saturday. All day long the skies had been grey, threatening rain.

“Maybe it’s still early,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe,” Omer said.

When we arrived in Taksim Square, we saw that a phalanx of police were standing guard in front of Gezi Park. Suprisingly, there were no security checkpoints.

The square itself, apart from the police, was noticeably calm. A group of journalists with their cameras were crowded around someone who we thought was making a speech. We thought it might be a government official, so we wandered over to have a look and listen.

You felt the police eyeing you, marking you, that’s for sure. We made a point of looking as innocuous as possible. We peered over the huddled group of reporters. A small group of people, maybe four or five, were reading from a book. One of the people was a prominent Turkish journalist and fierce Erdogan critic.

“They’re just reading books,” Omer said. We read later that it was a “passive protest.” Similar passive protests were being conducted at Haydarpasa Train Station and at other points around the city. The police, and the prime minister’s harsh warnings, had had evidently had their effect: Almost everbody, except for a few of us, the idly curious, seemed to be avoiding Taksim.

We stayed for a few minutes longer, then as we started to walk away, a couple of policemen guided us along a certain narrow path. They seemed to want to confine people to certain limited areas, and to prevent anyone from staying long enough to allow large groups to form.

The scene was desultory; even many of the police looked half-bored, some of them lounging on the steps of the park entrance.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked Omer. “Shall we have a beer?”

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So now we were sitting at Nevizade Pasaj, having had a few beers and kept an eye on Twitter for updates. It was past four o’clock. We had seen the announcement about the closure of the public transport. We also read that CNN International reporter Ivan Watson had been arrested and briefly detained by police at Taksim Square. Police had been ordered to check all foreign journalists’ credentials and to request they show their passports.

Actually I was familiar with Ivan Watson’s work. He’s a good, responsible journalist, and I reflected that at the time of his arrest, he was probably just doing his job – asking questions. Anyway, it was good to see they let him go – with an apology for one policeman for “kneeing him in the butt” (this, according to Watson in his subsequent post).

“And look at this –” Omer showed me more Tweets. Not two hours ago, we had walked from Taksim Square to Istikklal without any problems. Now, more police had arrived, and blocked all access to the square.

Ozge called (“You guys both OK?”). She was getting off of work, and heading back to Kadikoy. It wouldn’t be any use her trying to join us, since even the funicular was now closed, and police were tightening their patrols all around the vicinity. I said I’d see her at home that evening.

Omer and I paid the bill. “So how are going to get out of here?” I asked. By going right on Istikklal, we could go away from the direction of Taksim Square, head down the hill to Karakoy, and get the ferryboat from there. The ferries to the Asian side were reportedly open.

“You want to try to have one more look at Taskim?” Omer asked.

So we turned left instead and went back down Istikklal toward the square. The closer we got we began to hear a small group of demonstrators chanting, “Tayyip, Istifa!” (Tayyip, Resign!). The police were everywhere, and the atmosphere felt very tense. Omer approached one of the policemen and asked how we could get back down the hill to Besiktas to get the ferry. He pointed us toward a side street, where we were met by another group of police, who waved us through.

We ended up having to take a very circuitous trip through the neighborhood of Cihangir, getting lost for a moment until a kindly shop owner got us back on the right track. We headed down the hill, grabbed a tram and got off at the ferry station.

The journey back across the Bosphorous was very quiet; the sky had cleared and the waters were inky blue. The passengers all had strained looks on their faces; one man near us sat staring off into space with a kind of puzzled expression. I reflected on the heavy police presence, how it choked access to Taksim, and the shut down of the public transport to the European side. Again, the trials of living in a mega-city: You felt something of what 16 million souls’ worth of frustration might feel like.

But there was something else, too; something Omer seemed to capture when he said:

“What pisses me off is that Taksim Square, Gezi Park, they are also mine. I mean, I am a citizen and I pay taxes. Why can’t I go there anytime I want?”

One year on, the park itself remains intact – a symbol that perhaps last summer’s protests did achieve something after all. But as we can see, there are still questions left unanswered.

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Addendum: Shortly after I left Taksim Square on Saturday, police reportedly cracked down on protesters in and around the square, using tear gas. A number of demonstrators were reportedly arrested using tear gas and water cannons.

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James Tressler was an award-winning reporter for The Times-Standard. His work has also appeared in The Prague Post. His books, including “Letters from Istanbul” and “Lost Coast D.A.,” are available at Lulu.com. He lives in Istanbul.