On May 1, 1977, a human sea of 500,000 workers packed Istanbul’s Taksim Square, flowing in from all over Turkey. Kemal Turkler, the head of the Revolutionary Labor Unions Confederation (DISK, Turkey’s largest leftist trade union), was in the middle of his speech when bullets rained on the crowd from the 10th floor of a hotel and the roof of a public building, both overlooking the square.
Panic led to a deadly stampede. The death toll, announced the following day, included 28 people crushed, one overrun by an armored vehicle and five killed by gunfire, in addition to 136 injured. The scenes of chaos remained engraved deep in Turkish memory.