No shopping mall or hotel at Gezi Park, says Istanbul mayor

Turkey will not build a shopping mall or hotels at Taksim’s Gezi Park, said Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbaş on Saturday, in a bid to further ease tensions with protesters after more than 10 days of mass demonstrations across the country.

He did, however, emphasize that plans for a replica of the Artillery Barracks, as announced several months ago by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will go ahead.

The protests began as a sit-in at a park in Taksim Square to prevent a redevelopment project that would replace the park with replica Ottoman barracks and other buildings. But violent intervention by police to eject the protesters on May 31 outraged many, and the protests spread to dozens of cities across Turkey.

“We absolutely do not think [of the Artillery Barracks] as a shopping mall, hotel or residences. The surface would not allow it. We will design it as a museum or an exposition center,” Topbaş told reporters on Saturday.

“We already declared it in our electoral program and our people voted us in accordingly. Our prime minister absolutely desires the Artillery Barracks to be built,” he added.

The mayor pointed out that most of the trees in the park would be preserved and vowed to plant more of them in Taksim Square.

Erdogan is to convene his party leadership as anti-government protests enter their ninth day, with thousands of people still occupying Istanbul’s central Taksim Square.

In the early hours of Friday morning, some 10,000 AKP supporters greeted the prime minister at the airport after his arrival from a four-day trip to North Africa.

“These protests that are bordering on illegality must come to an end immediately,” said Erdogan to the crowd.