Sivas
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was torched by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator of The Satanic Verses. |
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Sivas is a city in central Turkey and the seat of Sivas Province. According to a 2011 estimate, its urban population is 425,297.
On 2 July 1993, 37 participants in an Alevi cultural and literary festival were killed when a mob of demonstrators set fire to the Madimak hotel in Sivas during a violent protest by some 15,000 members of various radical Islamist groups against the presence of Aziz Nesin. The deaths resulted in the Turkish government taking a harder stance against religious fanaticism, militant Islam, and antisecularism. In late 2006, there was a campaign by the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Institute to convert the former hotel into a museum to commemorate the tragedy, now known as the Sivas massacre.