By Sunday night, most of the businesses on Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s biggest pedestrian street, seemed to have had their front teeth knocked in. ATM screens glared and winked stupidly from behind broken glass monitors. Display windows were smashed up, facades and metal shutters covered with antigovernment graffiti. Near Bekar Street, young people had taken over a number of buildings. Music, along with leftist banners, wafted out from their windows. Profiting from the lack of police, which had withdrawn from the area on June 1, vendors at the northern end of the street hawked bottles of beer, in plain and symbolic defiance of a recent ban on retail sales of alcohol between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. (The bill, rushed through by parliament last week, hasn’t yet been signed into law by President Abdullah Gul.) At Gezi Park, the scene of a sit-in that had been repeatedly and violently dispersed by the police last week, fueling popular outrage as well as mass demonstrations and violent clashes in dozens of Turkish cities, the mood was jubilant. The park, whose planned demolition and conversion into a shopping mall styled as a replica of an Ottoman barracks and shopping arcade made it ground zero of the protests, brimmed with groups of young men and women camped out on the grass. They lit campfires and chanted slogans demanding the resignation of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At the adjacent Taksim Square, normally heaving with traffic, thousands of protesters sang, waved Turkish flags and locked hands in a traditional line dance. Vendors sold roast chestnuts, cucumbers and slices of watermelon. (MORE: Is Taksim Erdogan’s Tahrir Square?) A few hundred yards away, beyond the scorched skeletons of three city buses, the landscape appeared even more surreal. Down the hill, waves of people attempting to reach protesters in another part of the city hurled themselves against lines of policemen, some throwing the gas canisters fired against them over the walls of a nearby soccer stadium, others ripping up road signs and giant billboards to construct barricades. The![]()
