A Coup in Turkey: A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land, by Jeremy Seal Maureen Freely

MAUREEN FREELY A Coup in Turkey: A Tale of Democracy, Despotism and Vengeance in a Divided Land

On a fogbound afternoon in February 1959, a Vickers Viscount crashed into the woods just short of Gatwick.

Margaret and Tony Bailey, whose farm was nearby, were the first to rush to the scene. They arrived to find three men whose silk ties and well-cut suits were covered in mud and blood. One of them was Adnan Menderes, the Prime Minister of Turkey.

To the many millions in Turkey who had brought this man to power nine years earlier, it was not just a miracle that he survived the crash. It was proof of his divine status. On the day of his return to Ankara, thousands poured in from the countryside to greet him at the train station, bringing with them their sheep, goats and oxen.

As they set about sacrificing these animals in his name, Menderes gave every appearance of being deeply moved. But for others, it was the last straw. Ataturk’s secular republic, not yet 40 years old, was under threat, and it would fall to the army to save it.

The coup was 15 months in the making. After a long, lurid trial, Menderes was found guilty of subverting the constitution and, along with his Foreign and Finance Ministers, sentenced to death. He was hanged on 17th September 1961 – a

day I remember well. I was nine. It was a Sunday. I’d gone to see my best friend, whose father worked at the US Consulate in Istanbul. She was the one who told me. And that was the last time I heard the name Menderes spoken out loud until I was well into my forties.

He is hardly the only figure to have been expunged from Turkey’s official history but he is certainly the most important. Before he came to power, the Turkish Republic was a one-party embodiment of Ataturk’s westernising vision. Menderes’s win in the nation’s first free election in 1950 was a testament to Islam’s abiding strength in the countryside.

Those sentiments were forced back underground in 1961. It took 30 years for Islamism to reclaim its populist base, and another decade for it to consolidate its power. But the Menderes miracle is now very much back in play, in the form of his most ardent admirer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The road from Menderes to Erdoğan is a twisted one, full of shadows, ghouls and strange delights. And I cannot imagine a better guide to it than Jeremy Seal. As a travel writer specialising in Turkey, he found that work was drying up in the wake of the coup that Erdoğan foiled in 2016 and went on to use as a pretext to stamp out all dissent. So Seal decided he might as well explore a mystery that had been gnawing at him since he happened on his first portrait of Menderes in the back room of a shack in a remote Anatolian valley many years before.

Why did the shack’s humble owners speak of having to keep the portrait hidden? Why, even in second-hand shops in Istanbul’s back streets, was it still so hard to find a single photograph of the man? A journalist might have contented himself with the story as told in the newspapers of the day – it has enough drama in it for a James Bond film.

It even has a bit part for Bond’s creator. Ian Fleming was himself at the Istanbul Hilton – attending an Interpol conference, no less – when the Menderes government sent mobs into the city’s European quarter to kill and terrorise its mostly non-muslim residents. Like so many of our contemporary demagogues, Menderes kept control by creating chaos.

A historian might have wished to hammer that point home. Seal prefers to mention the parallels in passing. When anti-erdoğan protests erupt in nearby Gezi Park in 2013, the Hilton again becomes centre stage. When suicide bombers kill over 100 anti-erdoğan demonstrators in 2015, they do so just outside Ankara’s train station.

Wherever Seal’s meanderings take us – be it to the mosque Menderes built in

Ankara to dwarf its secular monuments, or to the museum Erdoğan has just opened in Menderes’s memory on the island where his gallows still stand – Seal’s first interest is in the poetry of the human landscapes surrounding them.

He takes us on a journey into a history that still lives, in a land still worth loving. May it be the first of many.