On the face of it, Silivri is just another seaside town. Shuttered and sleepy in the winter, it throngs with ice cream stands and holiday-home owners from nearby Istanbul in the summer. Then there’s the prison. A few miles out of town, the massive new complex — so big that signposts call it “Campus” — is home to a landmark court case that has made Silivri one of the most politically charged words in Turkey. Hundreds of high-ranking Turkish military officers, including former Chief of Staff Ilker Basbug, are behind bars there — along with journalists, lawyers and several members of parliament. They are accused of plotting to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government because of their opposition to its Islamist leanings. (MORE: The U.S. Embassy Bombing in Turkey — the Unusual Suspects) Across from its steel gates, a ragtag group of secularist protesters have set up camp in a field strung with fluttering red-and-white Turkish flags. They began arriving more than a year ago to attend the court hearings. Eventually they rented a field from a local farmer, installed prefabricated huts, dormitory-style beds and a wood stove and bunkered down. “This place is like Turkey’s conscience,” says Bugra Demiroren, 18, an economics major from Ankara, in Silivri on semester break. “There is so much accumulated anger and sorrow. What’s happening here isn’t normal.” Demiroren belongs to the Turkish Youth Union, a militantly secularist group that was formed in 2006 to protest Erdogan’s government and now has some 40,000 members. “2012 was a record year of growth for us,” he says. To Demiroren and people like him, Silivri is synonymous with the malaise of Turkish democracy under Erdogan. Silivri’s cells hold the captives of a government crackdown on a group called Ergenekon — named after a mythic valley to which Turks trace their origins. The Ergenekon purge began in 2007 as a police investigation into a shady network of military men, lawyers, journalists and intelligence agents who saw themselves beyond the reach of law. Many Turks initially supported it as a turning![]()
