PodcastNew photos of Turkey's Bloody May Day, 1977 discovered in flea market
Theatre actor Kazım Başer's visit to a flea market unearthed hitherto unknown photographs of the Bloody May Day, 1977. The photographs show the workers marching through Taksim Square before the massacre in which 34 people were killed.
Duvar English
Kazım Başer, a theatre actor living in Bornova district of Aegean İzmir, found unpublished photographs of the Bloody May Day, 1977 on a stall in a flea market.
Başer told Gazete Duvar the story of how the images of the workers' march before the massacre in Istanbul's Taksim Square, in which 36 people were killed and more than 130 injured by gunfire during the celebrations, unearthed.
"I have been going to the flea market in Bornova for years. Last weekend, while wandering around again, unaware of what was about to happen to me, I came across a notebook in one of the stalls containing negative films, nicely sorted in a folder, with an index on the first page. The seller didn't have much information about what was inside. Of course, negative films are not like normal postcards, you can't see what's inside at a glance, you have to hold them up to the light."
"I immediately thought I'd have a look at what was inside. There were photographs from 1976 and 1977, they were dated and it was written next to them what photographs they were. As I was scanning them quickly, when I saw the title ‘1977 Istanbul Workers' Day,’ my eyes suddenly lit up."