Placing Gezi Park in Time

The protests and civil resistance events that started initially against plans and attempts to demolish Gezi Park in Taksim, Istanbul in June 2013 quickly spread in various dimensions. Simultaneous occurrence of these events at many cities and their over a month-long duration was both unprecedented and unexpected. This chapter aims to shed light on the complexity of Gezi events from the perspective of individuals who took part in them. It reports findings of a fieldwork with short interviews with 123 protestors in Ankara. Through detailed analyses of the participants’ narratives, the chapter explores how different individuals made sense of Gezi events and placed them in the history of Turkey. It also sheds light to the effects of this intense period of political activity on individuals’ conception of and attachments to the society. In this regard, the narratives analysed in this chapter indicate that Gezi events helped re-establishing the street as a political sphere that does not necessarily subscribe to explicit ideologies but to new discourses and practices of engagement, and as a place of exchange, where those, whose interests are excluded from institutionalised politics, meet and claim access together.