When the putschists threatened to shoot her on July15, 2016, Safiye crossed her arms and stood there, saying they didn’t scare her
Ayse Aykac, a quiet housewife from Turkey's Black Sea region, began reading the Quran when she saw the breaking news that tanks were rolling down the streets of Istanbul.When her husband, Mustafa Aykac, said he was going out to resist the coup, she closed her Quran and told her husband that she was coming too. Mustafa, who had been her partner for 27 years, sternly rejected her request.
It would be better if she stayed inside the car, he told her. But she again refused. So the couple continued their journey together on foot, walking down the highway to the bridge at a fast pace, to meet their adversaries. Mustafa Aykac tends his deceased wife's tomatoes in the little garden by the family home, which is near the Bosphorus Bridge, where his wife was shot.
"I invite my nation to the squares of our cities [to oppose the coup]," Erdogan said in a dramatic call against those within the country's military apparatus who were trying to overthrow him and the democratically elected government. When he got closer to the tanks, he was shot twice from snipers positioned on the bridge. One rifle bullet pierced his right shoulder. Another shot struck his left leg. The bullets did not hurt him as much as the identity of those firing the shots hurt him."Our soldiers were shooting at us. When we went out, we didn't take even a stick with us. To be hit by our own soldiers hurt me so much. I started crying," Genc said.
Suddenly, a woman miraculously showed up at the bloody scene to challenge the colonel. Even now, Genc doesn't know how the 40-something woman was able to brave the heavy rain of bullets to reach his side. Finally, the officer gave in to the woman's demands and allowed for Genc to be carried away by two soldiers to a relatively safe area, out of the danger zone.
Yunus Emre Ezer with his daughter, Meryem, now aged nine. Meryem says the day putschists killed her father was"the most painful day of my life." "A 30-year-old kid was just killed in front of me. He was hit in his heart," he told his wife, Fatma Esra Ezer, over the phone. After that conversation, he and his brother decided to run towards the military units.
His brother survived, but is traumatised. Every night, he returns to the spot where his brother died and chain smokes his way through one or two boxes of cigarettes. She lives in Istanbul's neighbourhood of Uskudar, on the Asian side, not far from the bridge, and decided to see for herself what was going on outside. The 34-year-old mother of two walked alone down the highway, soon reaching the bridge where the rest of the protesters had gathered to oppose the coup plotters.
She refused to heed their advice, saying that she wanted to confront the soldiers directly about why they were there. Safiye Bayat with her son Harun Semih, left, and her brother Recep, near her house in Istanbul's Cengelkoy neighbourhood. "It is 1,500 kilometres away from Istanbul, and I was not used to a life like that, having been raised in Germany. But I was living with a man with whom you could live anywhere [on earth]," she recalled the days with her beloved husband in Erzurum.
Esma was watching news of the attempted coup unfold from Germany — not knowing at that very moment, her husband was one of those taking to the streets in protest in the working class Istanbul neighbourhood of Fatih.
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