The building's official name was the Zihni Paşa Köşkü — a 21-room villa in the Erenköy neighborhood of Kadıköy, on the Asian shore of Istanbul, built in the early 20th century for a trade minister of Sultan Abdülhamid II. After a fire destroyed the original structure in 1941 it was rebuilt, and in the early 1960s the Turkish military began renting it. Most Istanbullus knew it as the Ziverbey Villa, after the neighborhood, and for years it sat behind its garden walls without any public understanding of what happened inside. After the 12 March 1971 military memorandum — the so-called "coup by memorandum" — it became a place where people were taken, bound, blindfolded, and systematically subjected to interrogation and torture. What happened at Ziverbey was kept secret for decades. It was İlhan Selçuk, the journalist detained and tortured there, who finally forced it into the open.
On 12 March 1971, the Turkish Chief of General Staff delivered a written ultimatum to Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel demanding the formation of a new government capable of restoring order — and threatening to seize power directly if the demand was not met. Demirel resigned within hours. The military did not send tanks into the streets; it sent a memorandum. The background was years of political violence, economic instability, student unrest, and clashes between left-wing and far-right groups that had made the country feel ungovernable. The generals framed their intervention as a counter-coup against an alleged left-wing conspiracy within the armed forces — the so-called 9 March plot. Whether that conspiracy was real, exaggerated, or largely fabricated as justification remains contested. What is not contested is what followed: martial law was declared across eleven of Turkey's sixty-seven provinces, and thousands of people — intellectuals, journalists, students, trade unionists, and military officers suspected of leftist sympathies — were detained. Many were tortured.
The Zihni Paşa Villa was operated as a clandestine detention and interrogation site by the Special Warfare Department (Özel Harp Dairesi) and Counter-Guerrilla units — Turkey's NATO-linked stay-behind network — in cooperation with MİT, the national intelligence service. The overall command ran from Brigadier General Memduh Ünlütürk, who directed the interrogations, up through Lieutenant General Turgut Sunalp, a Korean War veteran, to General Faik Türün, Commander of the First Army. In a 1973 interview with the magazine Yankı, Türün would acknowledge the operation directly: "I had the mansion in Kadıköy specially prepared for the counter-insurgency organisation." Prisoners brought to the villa were bound and blindfolded. The interrogation methods — reportedly modeled on what the Korean War veterans had witnessed done to prisoners of war in Korea — left people physically damaged and psychologically broken. Those who survived carried the experience for the rest of their lives. Ertuğrul Kürkçü, an activist detained there, later described being held for thirty days, shackled to a bed, chains removed only for interrogation and torture sessions.
Among the people detained and tortured at the villa was İlhan Selçuk (1925–2010), a senior columnist and editor at Cumhuriyet, Turkey's oldest secular-republican daily newspaper. Selçuk was one of the most prominent leftist-Kemalist journalists of his generation, and he was brought to Ziverbey on suspicion of involvement in the alleged 9 March conspiracy. Under torture, he was forced to write a statement. He complied — but embedded a cipher in it. Taking the first letter of the penultimate word of each sentence, the message decoded to the Turkish phrase İşkence altındayım: I am under torture. It was a message in a bottle, sent from inside the villa, trusting that someone outside would know how to read it. In 1987, Selçuk published a memoir titled Ziverbey Köşkü, in which he described his experience in detail and named the Counter-Guerrilla organisation explicitly. The book was among the first Turkish-language accounts to bring the network's domestic operations into public view. Selçuk went on to continue writing for Cumhuriyet for decades. He died in 2010.
The Zihni Paşa Villa no longer stands. It was demolished in the 1990s. A residential complex called Ateşpare Erenköy Residence was built on the estate, and the former garden became Kuşluk Parkı — Bird-Nest Park. On 12 September 2013, chosen deliberately as the thirty-third anniversary of the 12 September 1980 military coup, a monument was inaugurated in Kuşluk Parkı on or near the former site of the villa. Designed by sculptor Professor Rahmi Aksungur of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and commissioned by Kadıköy Municipality with the civil society organisation ADAM-DER, the work stands 2.5 meters tall. It depicts three figures — two men and one woman — with their eyes blindfolded and their hands bound behind their backs. The pedestal inscription dedicates it to "the victims of torture and those who were tortured to death" during the 12 March 1971 period. Twice-yearly commemorations are held at the site on 12 March and 12 September each year. The park is quiet. The apartment towers rise above it. The three figures stand.
The former site of the Ziverbey Villa (now Kuşluk Parkı) lies at approximately 40.9767°N, 29.0828°E in the Erenköy neighborhood of Kadıköy, on the Asian (Anatolian) shore of Istanbul. This places it on the eastern side of the Bosphorus — the nearest major airport is Sabiha Gökçen International Airport (LTFJ), approximately 20 km to the southeast. From the air at 1,500–2,500 feet, the Kadıköy waterfront and the Haydarpaşa railway terminus are visible to the northwest; the Bosphorus and the European city lie further west. Erenköy is a residential neighborhood of low-rise housing and tree-lined streets, unremarkable from altitude — the history here is invisible from above.