A violent police raid on a sit-in protesting plans to build a mall at Taksim Square in Istanbul on May 31, 2013, became a rallying point for anger over the policies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Cengiz Candar, who has covered historic events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, wrote that the protests most remind him of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
