This Is Just the Beginning

This is just the beginning

Kiev, 2017
Edited by Fırat Yücel

In the first week of June 2013, a passerby walking from Sıraselviler Street to Taksim Square or approaching Gezi Park from Elmadağ, would be greeted by two banners: "To the Taksim Commune" they declared. A few days before these banners were put up and exactly 142 years after May 28, 1871, the day when the Paris Commune was evicted, one of my comrades, standing on the makeshift stage set up in Gezi Park, announced, "We continue, comrades!" and greeted the Paris communards. The slogan "This is just the beginning, the struggle goes on" which students, workers, young women and men chanted continuously for days and nights, sometimes on the barricades, sometimes walking the streets arm in arm, during May 68 in Paris, was translated into Turkish a few years prior: "Bu daha başlangıç, mücadeleye devam."

If the history of the oppressed is not written linearly like that of the sovereigns but rather unfolded in leaps across time and geographies, then, in that June, gazing from Taksim Square towards Gezi Park, you could sense the mourning for the fallen comrades of May 1, 77 in Taksim and the Paris commune, feel the taste of tear gas from a canister fired simultaneously in Sao Paolo, the uncanny air in Tahrir Square in that very moment, and the silence of the Armenian cemetery on which Gezi park was built.