Public security a la Turca

Emrullah Efendi, an Ottoman education scholar, became the minister of education in 1910. He was elected to the Ottoman Parliament in 1909 from the K?rklareli province in Thrace. 

The Balkan Wars were raging at the time, and governments were rising and falling like the hills of Istanbul. Emrullah Efendi resigned in 1911, was reappointed shortly thereafter, and lost his job again with the fall of the government in July 1912. He died in 1914, before he could see the Balkan Wars give way to the much deadlier Great War. 

When Emrullah Efendi was in government, Istanbul witnessed its first ever International Workers Day celebration on May 1. The first of such celebrations in the Ottoman Empire was held in Izmir in 1905, then in Skopje, in today?s Macedonia, in 1909. Both Istanbul and Izmir observed the day in 1912. 

The holiday had been born out of the Haymarket affair in Chicago, where, in May 1886, labor leaders protested the killing of workers by the police. It might have taken two centuries for the printing press to come to Turkey, but it took less than two decades for International Workers? Day celebrations to make it here. I guess the world was already becoming smaller and smaller in the late 19th century.

Yesterday marked the 110th year of our observance of May Day, yet we still have our problems with the holiday. It was long regarded as a communist affair and was occasion to violent protests in Taksim Square. In the 1990s, the occasion slowly oozed its way into the mainstream and in 2009, Parliament officially recognized International Workers? Day. Then Prime Minister Erdogan opened up Taksim for peaceful protests, saying that his government wanted to expand the holiday to embrace all political stripes of the country. Yet here we...