Young, Turk and Furious

In Turkey, it is considered uncool to not be a rebel at college. The law-abiding student who follows every rule is called an inek (cow). Girls like rebellious boys; boys fall for rebellious girls. The future prospects of a rebel are seen as more attractive than those of an academic achiever. The classic 'how we met' story of the parents of my generation (and the parents of most of the interviewees for this book) features a rebellious boy and a rebellious girl who meet in the classroom or the canteen of a college. They attend marches together; they look after one another under the oppressive regime of this or that prime minister or general; they get married under interesting and dangerous times, backgrounded by their country's politics, which they recount to their children when old age presses upon them.

Remember: this is the country where the jeunne Turks phenomenon was born. The term originally referred to a new generation of Ottoman citizens who wanted to reform their country before Young Turk gained an international meaning. 'A young person eager for radical change to the established order' is the definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary: to be a young Turk means to be ontologically a rebel.

Today, if a Turkish citizen thinks of her ancestors who lived a century ago, it is this image of a jeunne Turk that materializes in front of her: being a rebel in our youth is in our genes, as it were. All the best minds in Ottoman society and the Turkish republic, at least those in the school books, were rebels. Although they had diametrically opposing views – from defending shari'a rule to arguing in support of a working-class dictatorship inside Turkey – those figures have been fighting the state and risking prosecution and long prison sentences for defending their views for at least a century. The call of the rebellious spirit is rarely unanswered here: only the dull and the uninspired do not rebel in their youth. Such is the conventional wisdom.

When young people rebel here, the elderly and the powerful are expected to listen, which they only very rarely do. The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid did not listen to the republican youth when it rebelled; the president of single-party rule, Ismet Inonu did not listen to the communist youth when it rebelled; the 60 years of Turkish democracy have seen youth and state in constant struggle, which has been mostly an outcome of this denial of having a dialogue with the youth.

Not that Turkey's youth is eager to compromise in any political debate: doing so is seen as weak and unacceptable. Omurgasiz (spineless) is among the worst things you can be called in Turkey; selling out one's youthful ideals, making u-turns, succumbing to any form of compromise are seen as dastardly acts. People with passionate, uncompromising and never-bending wills are preferred over those with more conciliatory, diplomatic and seemingly opportunistic characteristics. The same applies to private relationships (thus the attraction of the rebellious youth) and the political sphere alike: leaders, of both left- and right-wing ideologies, are expected to have perfectly consistent life stories wherein the devotion to their political cause is not once compromised.

Such is the environment into which young people are born in Turkey. No wonder the country's young progressives and conservatives are so stubborn in their defence of their political ideas: anger, rebellion and youth have become synonymous in the historical and political psyche of Turkey. The jeunne Turk spirit of the 1900s had stood the test of geography and time.

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On the night of 27 May 2013, a 21-year-old college freshman was returning to his flat in Istanbul's old Armenian neighbourhood Samatya when he received some alarming news. Minutes earlier a demolition machine had attempted to cut down a tree in a public park in Taksim that the freshman, Cenk Yürükogullari, had spent the past week campaigning to save. Upon seeing the news on his Twitter timeline, Yürükogullari instinctively checked his watch; it was 11.30 p.m.; the last buses from Samatya to Taksim had already departed. But he could still take a dolmus – one of those large cars, a mixture of a cab and a bus, that only starts when it is filled with passengers. Yürükogullari, a student of conservation, telephoned a friend, a master's student in the field of archaeology who lived close by in the same neighbourhood, to ask whether he would like to come with him. The answer was positive; their dolmug moved from Samatya at midnight; half an hour later they reached Taksim. Most residents of Istanbul use those vehicles to return home from their night shifts or to go to Taksim for a bit of late-night entertainment. Yürükogullari and his friend's ride to Taksim was about quite a different matter. Those two angry young men were about to start the biggest protest Turkey had ever witnessed in its modern history.

It was a warm and damp night, heady with the scents of the 606 trees that filled the 98,000-square-metre park lying in front of them, concealed in darkness. As they walked among the black trees, Yürükogullari and his friend saw shadows moving swiftly from one tree to another. More than two dozen people had congregated near the exit of the park. As they neared those shadows they distinguished shapes of construction workers behind demolition machines, who were arguing with protestors. Now Yürükogullari was able to identify those shadowy figures: over the course of the previous week he had worked with them near the entrance of the Taksim subway station, distributing handouts which demanded an immediate halt to the construction, inside Gezi Park, of an Ottoman-style barracks that would serve as a shopping mall – a weird and unpopular idea which they were sure would upset the public if only people heard about the project through their protest movement.

Having temporally stopped the workers, the 30-strong group of protestors started holding a small forum to discuss what to do next. While that happened, Yürükogullari and his friend pitched two small tents inside the park. They joked about possible parallels between what they were getting ready to do (occupy Gezi Park) and Occupy protests in Wall Street, New York. 'Just imagine our protest snowballing into something like Occupy Taksim!' Yürükogullari joked. 'How about Occupy Istanbul?' his friend joked back. 'No way,' Yürükogullari responded, 'that would never happen.'

After the forum about future strategies, one protestor removed a canvas signboard placed there by municipality workers. When Yürükogullari got his hands on the object, he couldn't help but smile – the young man had been doing graffiti since his high school years. He disappeared into the darkness, only to return moments later with a can of paint. It was recycle time. Yürükogullari sprayed the...