The Silent Mother of Gezi: Turkey’s 1976 Statue of Peace and its Italian Echoes

In the heart of Istanbul’s Gezi Park, half-hidden by trees and traffic, stands a marble triad of upright forms. Commuters hurry past, few stop to notice the cracks that weather its surface. This statue of peace has watched nearly fifty years of Turkish history, hopes, coups, and protests unfolding without the stone ever moving.

Created in 1974 by Turkish sculptor Lerzan Bengisu and placed on public view in Gezi Park in 1976, the Statue of Peace is abstract: three upright marble volumes in close relation. Over time, many viewers have interpreted the grouping as a mother with two children; that reading has emotional force but reader should know it is. Set against the masculine archetypes that dominated monumental art, soldiers, leaders, laboring bodies, this essay adopts the maternal lens as a metaphor that harmonizes with the work’s formal relations, its site, and its woman creator.

The statue of peace in a contested square

Bengisu worked within the modernist current of the Republic era, prioritizing material, mass, and spatial relation over literal likeness. She belonged to a cohort of Turkish sculptors who brought modern forms into public space. The siting in Gezi, on the edge of Taksim Square, a long-standing civic stage, gave an otherwise quiet abstract work a durable public presence. Solid stone, in a place where meanings shift quickly.

A republic searching for calm

When the work went on public display in 1976, Turkey was taut with strain. Inflation ran hot, rural migration outpaced planning, parliament stalled in partisan gridlock. Public projects tried to signal continuity in a city bracing for rupture. Within that civic mood, Bengisu’s installation at Gezi read like an admonishment: the possibility that public space could hold difference without violence, much as its three interlocked forms hold tension in unison.

Only four years after its installation in Gezi, the 1980 coup re-militarized public life. Parties dissolved, journalists were jailed, activists driven underground. The square changed, yet the marble did not. Under a harsher sky, the same three forms felt different. What had once felt like a pledge now felt like a witness.

The changing language of “peace”

In Turkish public life, barış, meaning peace, has been elastic. Turkey titled the 1974 Cyprus “Peace Operation,” celebrated at home as success rather than reconciliation. Decades later it returned in “Operation Peace Spring” (2019) in Syria. The word that spelled hope also implied force. Through it all, the statue endured, no dove, no handshake, three masses clustered together. It models proximity, empathy, closeness, and endurance in the face of what may come.

From its small patch of park, the triad “watched” eras of tightening control: the chill of the early 1980s; the securitized 1990s; the public reckoning of Gezi 2013, when a plan to remake the park sparked a nationwide defense of assembly; the post-2016 climate of emergency and suspicion; and recent years in which streets, media, and civil society have all felt narrower. Each turn arrived wrapped in the language of order, stability, and, often, “national peace.” The stone did not move. The meaning around it did.

The gender of memory

Turkey’s monumental tradition has loved masculine scripts: the soldier, the leader, the laboring body; bronze and stone cast for command. Bengisu’s work, though non-figurative, evokes a different register. Read as a mother and two children, the piece offers a grammar of care rather than conquest, shelter instead of power. Even as metaphor, that was a radical widening of the civic imagination: a public monument that suggests protection without armor, relation without hierarchy, endurance without domination.

It is precisely because the forms are so abstract that they carry interpretive leeway without hardening into a set meaning. Their stable verticality and closeness as a triad allow a feminine ethos to emerge, tender steadiness, attention, co-presence, without turning the stone into a literal musculature.

The wider climate, 1960s–70s: abstraction, the female figure, and rights echoed in Italy

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Europe’s public art turned away from triumphant figurations toward spare, open forms that could hold conflicting memories without dictating a single narrative. Across Italy, this shift unfolded alongside social ferment: student and worker movements, the feminist wave, and the anni di piombo, when politics spilled into the streets. Artists answered with languages that resisted command, Marisa Merz’s Arte Povera works folded care and domestic labor into abstraction; Giorgio de Chirico’s late statues defamiliarized the classical figure through mannequin-like presences; Costantino Nivola pressed sculpture into plazas and schools so it lived with citizens rather than above them. These practices shared a conviction that sculptural form could model relations, proximity, shelter, endurance, without the old heroic appeal to archetypes of epic strength.

Turkey’s arc rhymed with this, even as its politics took a harder edge. After the 1960 coup and the 1971 memorandum, Istanbul’s public sphere became a theater of contest as much as celebration; yet in the mid-1970s, when Bengisu conceived and placed the work, there was a brief, uneven latitude for civic and cultural initiatives in which municipalities could place modern abstract statuary in central spaces and civil society was still audible, even amid mounting polarization. By 1980, another coup would remilitarize daily life and narrow that space dramatically. In that in-between, abstract public monuments gained a different charge. They neither glorified the state nor caricatured dissent; they proposed, quietly, the terms on which a plural city might still share ground.

Lerzan Bengisu’s 1974 Statue of Peace, set on the lip of Taksim, belongs squarely to this European conversation and answers Turkey’s moment with its own vocabulary. Three vertical masses touch and hold without fusing; many viewers read a mother and two children there, but the statue refuses to close the meaning. Like Merz, it lets a feminine ethic emerge without literal bodies; like Nivola, it sits where people pass, asking to be lived with; like de Chirico’s estranged figures, it disarms certainty. In a square that stages power, Bengisu’s statue models relation. That is why it still matters: not as illustration, but as a civic discipline, stone teaching a city how to stand together without becoming the same.

Gezi, 2013 and after

Gezi Park’s name now reminds many of that particular year. Tear gas in the trees, improvised clinics, a city arguing over who gets to sound off in public. Human-rights reporting memorialized the crackdown as a brutal denial of the right to peaceful assembly. Whatever one thinks of the original redevelopment plan, the square’s troubled history still shadows Taksim today.

In the years since, independent assessments have continued to rate Turkey poorly on civil liberties and political rights. That climate is legible in the familiar choreography of bans, barriers, and police lines around the square. Again, the stone is unchanged even as the square convulses.

Ongoing relevance

Public art in a contested square is more than decoration. It is a continuing proposition about how bodies, statues and human, can share space. The statue of peace at Gezi has no faces to flatter. No weapon to brandish. No inscription to shout. Just relation, held in stone, across decades of masculine certainty and state command. In a city where voices struggle to be heard, a form that quietly invokes togetherness may be the more subversive kind of power.

Until the meaning of peace stops collapsing into obedience, the silent mother of Gezi, metaphor and marble together, will go on watching. Stone-still, unacknowledged, steadfast in the arena of disunity.