The attackers were efficient and deliberate. Ski masks concealed their faces. They poured petroleum on the ground floor and threw Molotov cocktails. The blaze climbed rapidly through the building, moving floor by floor, shattering windows, filling stairwells with smoke. People on the upper floors had no safe route down. The fire that day killed 13 civilians — mostly women and store employees — and left five others injured.

The attack was carried out in the context of a specific and ugly political moment. Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), had recently been captured and brought to Turkey for trial. The PKK carried out a series of attacks across the country in the days and weeks that followed, and Turkish authorities attributed the Mavi Çarşı fire to that campaign. The 13 people who died in Göztepe had no connection to the events being protested. They were civilians, in a store, on a Saturday.

Turkish authorities moved quickly. On 23 March 1999 — ten days after the attack — the Chief of the General Directorate of Security, Necati Bilican, announced that four suspects had been apprehended, including the planner of the attack. On 14 July 1999, the four defendants were brought to court. Three were men; one was a woman named Azime Işık. All four admitted in their initial statements to having planned and executed the attack.

The public prosecutor sought the death penalty for all defendants. Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2002 as part of its European Union accession process, and the sentences ultimately handed down were: three defendants received aggravated life imprisonment without parole; Azime Işık received life imprisonment. Years later, in a legal development that drew public attention, a retrial resulted in an acquittal — a resolution that caused significant pain and controversy among those who had been seeking justice for the victims.

Göztepe is a residential district of Kadıköy on Istanbul's Asian side — a middle-class neighborhood of apartments, markets, tea houses, and streets where ordinary life plays out. The Mavi Çarşı stood there as a local institution: the kind of store where families went, where workers took their lunch break, where people bought everyday things.

The attack on 13 March 1999 destroyed more than a building. It killed people who had no role in the political conflict that motivated it. Their names are held in annual commemorations. The fire that swept through those five floors claimed civilians with no stake in the violence being committed in their neighborhood's name. In Göztepe, and across Istanbul, the anniversary is marked not as a political occasion but as a memorial: for people who went to a department store and did not come home.

Turkey has marked 13 March with varying degrees of official and public acknowledgment over the decades since. The victims of the Mavi Çarşı fire appear in the records of human rights organizations alongside victims of other acts of political violence from the same turbulent period. They are remembered by family members, by Göztepe residents, and by people who see in the attack a particular kind of cruelty: the targeting of civilians going about daily life.

The Blue Market massacre does not belong to any political narrative that glorifies it or uses it as a mere instrument of argument. It belongs to the 13 people who died — to their families and to the city that lost them on an ordinary Saturday afternoon in 1999.