Ottoman Beginnings
The labour movement under Ottoman rule grew up unevenly across an empire that was barely industrial. The first strike at the Tophane shipyard in 1872, the secret "Amele-i Osmani Cemiyeti" (Union of Ottoman Workers) founded in 1894, and a wave of strikes after the 1908 restoration of the constitution all preceded any May Day rally. The Young Turk government answered in 1909 with a Strike Law designed to choke off the new workers' organisations. The first Labour Day celebration on Ottoman soil was held that same year in Skopje; tobacco and cotton workers in Thessaloniki followed in 1911, and Istanbul saw its first 1 May rally in 1912, in the Belvü garden in Pangaltı. The Balkan Wars then provided the pretext for the Young Turks to ban workers' organisations outright.
The Republic and the Long Silence
The early Republic offered a brief opening. After a 1922 celebration in Ankara that reflected the new state's close wartime ties to the Soviet Union, 1 May 1923 was officially declared "Amele Bayramı" (Labour Day). The opening lasted barely a year. The government banned mass public May Day celebrations in 1924, and the Law on the Maintenance of Order (Takrir-i Sükûn) of 1925, passed in the wake of the Sheikh Said rebellion, prohibited Labour Day celebrations altogether. The ban held for half a century. The Kemalist state rebranded 1 May as "Spring and Flower Day" — an apolitical successor in the manner of many interwar regimes — and a generation of Turkish workers grew up without ever celebrating International Workers' Day in public. Strikes themselves were criminalised in 1933.
1976 And The Return To Taksim
The thaw came late and from below. Through the 1960s and 1970s, accelerating urbanisation and industrialisation produced a much larger working class, and the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK), founded in 1967, gave it an organised left voice. After a small 1975 gathering at a Tepebaşı casino, DİSK organised the first mass May Day rally in decades on 1 May 1976 in Taksim Square. The turnout astonished everyone. Taksim — already the symbolic heart of secular republican Istanbul, dominated by the Republic Monument — was reclaimed in a single afternoon as the country's labour square. The 1977 rally was planned as the consolidation of that breakthrough.
Bloody May Day, 1977
It became the worst day in the history of the Turkish labour movement. On 1 May 1977, an estimated 500,000 people filled Taksim Square in a DİSK-led rally; smaller leftist factions had been allowed to march at the rear of the procession on condition that they keep their distance. Towards the end of a speech by DİSK chairman Kemal Türkler, shots rang out from the surrounding buildings — the Sular İdaresi (Water Supply Company) and the Intercontinental Hotel (the rebranded Sheraton, then the tallest building in Istanbul) were the two repeatedly named by witnesses. Panic broke the crowd. Police moved in with armoured vehicles, sirens, and pressurised water; a police vehicle blocked Kazancı Yokuşu, the nearest exit, and most of the deaths came in the crush that followed.
Casualty figures vary between 31 and 36 killed and 126 to 220 injured. Over 500 demonstrators were detained and 98 indicted; the prosecution case ended in acquittal in October 1989. None of the perpetrators were ever caught. Suspicion fell almost immediately on the Counter-Guerrilla — the Turkish branch of NATO's stay-behind networks — and on the right-wing paramilitary groups operating in coordination with parts of the security apparatus. Then opposition leader Bülent Ecevit said publicly within a week that "the counter-guerrilla is running an offensive and has a finger in the 1 May incident." A reel of film shot by lawyer Rasim Öz, said to show snipers on the Water Supply Company roof, was handed to the prosecutor's office and "lost" at police headquarters; some twenty men reportedly detained on the same roof never appeared in any official record. The investigating prosecutor, Çetin Yetkin, was reassigned after three months and resigned. The case ran out the clock on the statute of limitations.
Coup, Ban, and a Contested Square
The massacre marked the beginning of the end for the Turkish left of that era. In the three years after Bloody May Day, political violence between the left, the neofascist Grey Wolves, and state-linked networks killed thousands. The military coup of 12 September 1980 ended the cycle by ending the movement: DİSK was suspended, its leaders put on trial, and Labour Day celebrations were banned across the country. From 1979 onward, Taksim itself was off-limits on 1 May, a prohibition that turned every subsequent anniversary into a small confrontation between unions trying to reach the square and the riot police barring it.
The holiday was nominally restored in 2009, and in 2010 — under an Erdoğan government still pursuing rapprochement — Taksim was opened to a peaceful May Day rally for the first time in a generation, with celebrations in 2011 and 2012 confirmed in part by a 2012 European Court of Human Rights ruling that the prior bans had violated freedom of assembly. The opening did not last. After the Gezi Park protests of 2013, Taksim was closed to May Day demonstrations again, and it has stayed closed. Each year unions and the May 1 Taksim Initiative announce their intention to march; each year the square is sealed off, the Taksim metro and funicular suspended, and the central commemoration displaced to an alley off Kazancı Yokuşu where, since 2009, a wreath is laid in the early morning for the dead of 1977. As recently as 27 April 2026, more than thirty people were detained near Gezi Park trying to reach the same alley.
In Athens the wreath on the door and the names on the wall sit side by side; in Istanbul the wreath is laid in a side street under police guard, and the names on the wall belong to a square the workers' movement is no longer permitted to enter. Almost half a century on, Bloody May Day remains the unfinished business of Turkish democracy.
Photo: https://kroniko.org/1-mayisa-giderken-neden-mi-taksim/