On Sunday morning, neighborhoods across Istanbul woke up to what has by now become a hauntingly familiar smell — tear gas. Before dawn, clouds of it enveloped the Bosporus Bridge, as riot police confronted hundreds of protesters trying to reach the city’s European shore. Around Taksim Square and Gezi Park, where renewed clashes erupted on Saturday night, its stink, combined with that of garbage left uncollected, infested the summer sea breeze. Outside the Divan Hotel, just north of Gezi, where groups of protesters sheltered throughout the night, and where police responded by firing tear gas into the lobby, dozens of exhausted, bleary-eyed young men and women camped out on the sidewalk. “They gassed people just in front of the entrance,” Halit Eke, 24, a university student, told me. “They were picking their targets and shooting plastic bullets and gas canisters straight at us. There were children inside, mothers and even pregnant women.” “The hotel people took us inside, as guests, filling up to the fourth floor. We were trapped in a huge gas capsule and couldn’t get out,” he said. As he spoke, a column of police officers passed in front of the building. The protesters booed them and whistled. “We won’t go until we’ve taken back Gezi,” said Eke. (PHOTOS: Protests Rile Istanbul as Police and Protesters Clash) Barely a day earlier, the mass antigovernment protests that erupted after a police crackdown against a handful of young activists opposed to the planned demolition of Gezi Park, a small and rare green space in Istanbul, appeared to be calming. On Friday after a two-week confrontation, Turkey’s hitherto intransigent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had finally yielded some ground to the protesters. The demolition of Gezi, he announced after a tense, lengthy meeting with a small group of civil-society representatives, would be suspended until a court ruled on its legality. The Gezi Park occupiers, insisting that it was too late for such concessions, and that the protests were now about much more than the fate of the tiny park, refused to budge. Five people, including a police officer, have died and more than 7,000 have been injured since![]()
