Taksim Gezi Park

Gezi Park is a roughly 3.8-hectare green space at the northern edge of Taksim Square in Istanbul's Beyoglu district - and one of the politically most charged places in Turkey. The northern section, the historic "Taksim Bahcesi" of 1869, was once the first public park of Ottoman Istanbul. Today the park is a simple layout of plane trees, benches and lawns - architecturally nothing special. It became globally famous in May 2013, when plans to fell the trees and build a copy of the Ottoman Topcu barracks as a shopping centre flipped a small sit-in into a nationwide protest wave against the Erdogan government - the Gezi protests, with millions of participants and very harsh police violence. The park is still standing and the construction was cancelled. Today you see families, day-trippers and tourists heading for Taksim, with only faint visible traces of the 2013 events.