In April 1909, soldiers marched on Istanbul to overturn a constitutional government. The uprising — known as the 31 March Incident, for the date it fell on the Rumi calendar — lasted three months before it was suppressed. Seventy-four soldiers died defending the parliament they had been ordered to protect. Two years later, in 1911, their names were carved into the marble sides of a monument on the highest hill in Şişli, 130 meters above sea level, on a place that would come to be called Hürriyet-i Ebediye Tepesi: Eternal Liberty Hill. The monument's name is Abide-i Hürriyet — the Monument of Liberty. It has stood there for more than a century, and the city has grown around it.
The history behind the monument stretches back further than 1909. In 1876, Sultan Abdülhamid II came to power appearing to accept a constitution and opening the first Ottoman Parliament. Within two years, using the ongoing war with Russia as justification, he suspended Parliament and governed as an absolute monarch for the next three decades. In 1908, mounting pressure from the constitutionalist movement known as the Young Turks — formally the Committee of Union and Progress — forced the restoration of Parliament in what became the Second Constitutional Era. The countercoup of April 1909 was an attempt to reverse that restoration. It failed. Forces from Rumelia, the Army of Action under the command of Mahmud Shevket Pasha, marched on the capital and put down the uprising by late July. Abdülhamid II was deposed and sent into exile in Salonica. The constitutional government survived, at the cost of seventy-four lives.
Architect Muzaffer Bey won the design competition for the monument and worked on it between 1909 and 1911. What he built takes the form of a cannon pointing skyward — a martial shape for a martial sacrifice — set on a triangular marble base. On each face of the triangle are carved the names of the soldiers interred there: men who died in the fighting on July 23, 1911, when their remains were buried here in a state ceremony. Around the base, pathways radiate outward in a five-pointed star pattern enclosed by a circle — the star and crescent of the Turkish flag traced in stone and gravel. The monument bears the tughra, the imperial seal, of Sultan Mehmed V Reşad, who was on the throne when it was completed. The tughra of the sultan whose predecessor the soldiers had effectively helped depose was added to a memorial for those who had defended his predecessor's constitution. History does not resolve neatly.
Over the years, the graves of four senior Ottoman officials were moved to the park surrounding the monument. Midhat Pasha, one of the chief architects of the 1876 Ottoman constitution and twice Grand Vizier, died in exile in Taif in Arabia; his remains were brought here. Mahmud Shevket Pasha, who commanded the Army of Action that suppressed the countercoup and later served as Grand Vizier, was assassinated in 1913 and buried here. These two men's stories have a certain clarity: they served the constitutional order and paid for it. The other two burials are more complicated. Talat Pasha, a former Grand Vizier and the architect of the Armenian genocide, was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 and reinterred here in 1943. Enver Pasha, Minister of War during the First World War, died in Central Asia in 1922; his remains were returned here in 1996. The monument holds all of them. Who rests in a place, and why, accumulates its own history.
The monument has not stood as a piece of quiet history. After the Taksim Square violence of May Day 1977 — when dozens of people were killed during a Labour Day gathering — trade unions moved their annual May Day marches to this hill for many years, the monument's associations with constitutional defense lending the location a symbolic gravity. On April 29, 2007, a large rally against proposed constitutional changes drew crowds here again. The outline of the monument appears in the official logo of Şişli district. It shows up in photographs of political demonstrations, in ceremonial backdrops, in the ordinary visual vocabulary of the city. Eternal Liberty Hill has not been left to rest. It keeps being pressed into service — which may be, in its way, the most fitting tribute to what it was built for.
The Monument of Liberty is located at 41.0681°N, 28.9821°E on Hürriyet-i Ebediye Tepesi (Eternal Liberty Hill), the highest point in Şişli at 130 meters above sea level, in the Mecidiyeköy area of Istanbul. From the air, the hill sits northeast of the Bosphorus strait and northwest of the historic peninsula; the surrounding neighborhood is dense with mid-rise buildings and major roadways. The park and monument are visible as a small green space amid the urban grid. Istanbul Airport (LTFM) lies approximately 20 kilometers to the northwest. Approach from the Bosphorus at 2,000–3,500 feet for orientation; the monument's hilltop position makes it a useful reference point in the otherwise undifferentiated urban fabric of central Istanbul.