The university district around Beyazıt Square was, in 1978, a place of intense political energy. Turkey was caught in a cycle of violence between left-wing and right-wing factions — a crisis that would eventually lead to a military coup in 1980. Istanbul University's students were active participants in that political life, as students at the country's oldest university often were. On 16 March, a group of left-wing students had gathered on and around the campus. As they were leaving, attackers struck with a bomb and gunfire. The square — which had served as a public space since Byzantine times, and which on any given day filled with tram passengers, booksellers, and pigeons — became a scene of chaos and grief.

Each of the seven people who died that day was a young person at the beginning of their life. Abdullah Şimşek, Baki Ekiz, Cemil Sönmez, Hamit Akıl, Hatice Özen, Murat Kurt, Turan Ören — their names are inscribed in Turkey's collective memory of political violence. They were not soldiers or officials; they were students. The forty-one who survived the attack carried their injuries differently: some physical, some invisible. In Turkey, 16 March is still marked by survivors and by relatives of those killed, who have sought for decades to ensure the victims are not reduced to statistics.

The legal aftermath of the attack stretched across decades, and resolution proved elusive. Orhan Çakıroğlu, identified as the head of the Istanbul branch of the Grey Wolves — a Turkish ultranationalist organization — was convicted in 1980 and sentenced to eleven years. He was released on appeal in 1982. The case dragged on for years, hampered by legal obstacles. By the time the thirty-year statute of limitations expired, the criminal case was effectively closed. In the interim, the mother of one of the shooters acknowledged her son's involvement, stating he had acted on orders from a police officer. A witness at the scene reported that police did not pursue the attackers as they fled. Hurriyet Daily News and other Turkish outlets later reported that judges and prosecutors in the case were found to have been at fault.

What does it mean to mark an atrocity that was never fully adjudicated? Every year on 16 March, the families of those who died return to this question. The absence of full accountability does not erase the fact of what happened: seven young people were killed at a university gate on a spring morning, by assailants who acted with political intent. For those who study Turkey's period of political violence between 1975 and 1980 — a period in which thousands of people died across the ideological spectrum — the Beyazıt massacre stands out because of where it happened: in the heart of Istanbul's historic center, at one of the country's most prominent universities, in broad daylight. It was a message as much as an act, and it was heard.

Beyazıt Square today is a restored public space, its Ottoman and Byzantine layers visible in the Bayezid II Mosque, the university's Neo-Renaissance gate, and the ancient pavement beneath. The tram runs past. Cafés are full. Students still cross the square every day, heading in and out of the same campus gate through which Abdullah Şimşek and his fellow students passed on 16 March 1978. There is no monument at the site marking what happened there. The square holds the memory quietly, the way public spaces often do — holding grief alongside everything else, in plain sight.