Standing Behind the Book: Remembering İlhan Erdost

On the evening of 7 November 1980, in a military vehicle going from the Ankara Police Directorate to Mamak Military Prison, a publisher of thirty-six was beaten to death. His crime was printing books. His name was İlhan Erdost.

Today, 7 November 2026, is the 46th year of İlhan Erdost's killing. The same day is also the anniversary of the October Revolution. As his elder brother Muzaffer İlhan Erdost said until the end of his life, this was not a coincidence. It was a choice.

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First, in Brief

Before the long piece, let us gather what must be known in seven points:

1. Who was he? İlhan Erdost was born on 17 December 1944, in the district of Artova in Tokat, to a poor family. After primary school he had to work, and he went on with his schooling in Ankara beside his elder brother Muzaffer. He entered the law faculty and did not finish it. He gave his life to publishing. He was married and had two daughters.
2. What did he do? He was the backbone of Sol Yayınları, founded in 1965, and then of Onur Yayınları. These two publishing houses became one of the most important channels that brought the basic texts of scientific socialism into Turkish.
3. Why was he targeted? The 12 September junta took him and his brother into custody on the charge of "printing and keeping banned publications". One of the books shown as a reason was Engels's Dialectics of Nature. In the printing house, not a single banned publication was found.
4. What happened? On the evening of 7 November 1980, while he was being taken to Mamak, he was beaten again and again by four privates, on a sergeant's order, in the military vehicle, in the prison yard and in the ward. His ribs were broken. He died in front of his brother's eyes, saying "I cannot breathe".
5. What sentence was given? In a case that lasted seven years, the privates received sentences of between 8 years and 10 years and 8 months. The sergeant who gave the order first received 10 years and 8 months, the Military Court of Cassation quashed the ruling, and in the end he got away with 6 months for "neglect of duty". The prison commander was never tried.
6. Why does it matter? Because his is the death that shows, in the most naked way, that 12 September opened a war not only on organisations, unions and parties, but on thought itself, on the book, on the right to read.
7. What does he leave us? An unshowy, quiet, stubborn honour: to stand behind the work one does. To count bringing knowledge to the people as a duty, not as a profession.

Now let us go into the detail.

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Sol Yayınları: Changing a Country's Map of Reading

Reading Marx in the Turkey of 1965

Today a young person can reach the texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin from their phone in a few seconds. This ease has a history, and an important part of that history was written in Ankara, in the small publishing house of two brothers.

Until the middle of the 1960s, the socialist classics in Turkey either did not exist, or they were texts passed from hand to hand, mostly incomplete, sometimes copied from foreign languages. After the 1951 TKP arrests, the intellectual accumulation of the left was largely scattered, and articles 141 and 142 of the Turkish Penal Code had banned "communist propaganda" with heavy sentences. Even reading a book could be counted as evidence of a crime.

In the relative climate of freedom opened by the 1961 Constitution, Muzaffer Erdost founded Sol Yayınları in 1965. The aim was clear: to bring the basic sources of scientific socialism into Turkish. While Muzaffer carried the intellectual and editorial load of the house, the daily backbone of the work, the press, the distribution, the accounts, the book's reaching the reader, was in İlhan's hands. When Muzaffer was arrested on 12 March 1971, İlhan took on the whole responsibility of Sol and Onur Yayınları.

What changed?

From the middle of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s, an important part of the socialist literature in Turkey was read through these publishing houses. The works of Marx and Engels, handbooks of philosophy and history, even classics such as Ibn Khaldun and Darwin that teach one to look beyond the borders, reached the people from these shelves. A generation read the basic works of socialism from Sol Yayınları.

The class meaning of this has to be grasped well:

When knowledge is a monopoly	When knowledge becomes a commons
Socialist texts are open only to a narrow circle of intellectuals who know a foreign language	The factory worker, the village teacher, the student from the provinces can read the same text in Turkish
"Marxism" is known by hearsay, caricatured, in the enemy's description	Concepts are learned from the source, by being discussed
Organising rests on instinct and anger	Organising rests on theory, history and the scientific method
Reading is an individual curiosity	Reading, through reading groups, is a collective act
The ruling ideology is a single voice	The intellectual infrastructure of a counter-hegemony is being built

Behind the workers' movement of the 1970s, the rise of DİSK, 15-16 June, and the organising of teachers and students, there was of course not a publishing house on its own. But the two brothers' cheap and careful printings had a large share in that movement being a movement that reads, discusses and thinks. İlhan knew this. To see that the books they published were read and discussed was his quiet pride.

We call this publishing, in today's language, a knowledge commons. The idea whose name bilgimusterekleri.org carries is an idea born on those shelves: knowledge is the common property of those who produce it and of those who need it; it cannot be enclosed by a wall of profit or of prohibition.

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12 September: The War Opened on the Book

Why did the junta fear the book?

The coup of 12 September 1980 was an operation to crush organised labour so that capital could apply the 24 January Decisions. We told this in detail in the 12 September dossier. But the junta did not content itself with closing the unions and banning the parties. It also wanted to take from a class the tools with which that class understands itself.

For this reason, one of the most emblematic images of 12 September is the books that were seized and burned. Hundreds of thousands of books were destroyed and sent as pulp to paper factories; people, in fear, buried their own libraries in the ground and burned them in the stove. Nazım Hikmet or Marx being found in a house could be a reason for custody.

Publishers were on the front line of this war. Because seizing the book was not enough; the hand that produced the book had to be stopped too.

Custody and the charge

İlhan Erdost was taken into custody in the first days of November 1980 (on 5 November, according to some sources). As he left the house, he could not bring himself to wake his little daughter. His elder brother Muzaffer was taken with him. The charge: keeping a large number of banned publications at the İlkyaz printing house.

Yet there was not a single banned publication in the printing house. What is more striking, the decision for the printing house to be reopened was given on 30 October 1980, only seven days before İlhan's death. The same martial-law commander, Recep Ergun, had signed both the decision to open the printing house and the decision to take the two brothers into custody. The charge contradicted even the junta's own documents. The problem was not the books. The problem was the people who printed those books.

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Mamak: The Evening of 7 November 1980

"These are snakes"

On the Friday evening of 7 November 1980, the two brothers, handcuffed, were put into a military vehicle to be taken from the Ankara Police Directorate to Mamak Military Prison. In the vehicle, under the responsibility of Sergeant Şükrü Bağ, there were four privates. According to testimonies that entered the court records, the sergeant said to the privates:

"These are snakes. If you do not make their mothers cry, I will make your mothers cry!"

According to Muzaffer İlhan Erdost's account, the sergeant also said this to the brothers before the beating:

"You poisoned ten-year-old babies. The inside is full of the ones you poisoned."

Let us read this sentence well. In the torturer's eye, the "poison" was the book. Young people reading Marx, Engels and Nazım was a poisoning, and the hand that printed the poison had to be punished. 12 September's view of thought cannot fit more clearly than this into a single sentence.

The beating began in the vehicle, continued in the prison yard, and went on in C Block, inside the ward. İlhan had pleaded with the sergeant: "I came here without being able to bring myself to wake my little daughter; do not have us beaten any more!" The answer he received was this: "I too left my little daughter in a sickbed because of you and came here." His ribs were broken. His hair and his moustache were cut, and he was registered. A single word was written in the prison book as his "view": Left.

He collapsed on the floor of the ward. His last word was "I cannot breathe". A young medical student among the prisoners in the ward gave artificial respiration and could not save him. The only sentence of the health worker who came was "This one is dead!"

A brother's testimony

All of this happened in front of Muzaffer's eyes. Years later, telling it, he would say:

"I said 'İlhan, İlhan', and he gave no sound."

"We were beaten together. How bitter that he went, and I stayed."

The year after his brother's death, Muzaffer wrote the book called İlhan İlhan. He gave the bookshop the same name. And he changed his own name: he lived the rest of his life as Muzaffer İlhan Erdost. He carried that name until he left us on 25 February 2020, at the age of 88. A person adding his brother's name to his own name is one of the plainest, most personal and strongest answers that can be given against being made forgotten.

Why 7 November?

Muzaffer İlhan Erdost said that the two brothers were targeted especially on the anniversary of the October Revolution, and that the death was not an ordinary "excess" but was organised by the contra-guerrilla structure in which the prison administration also took part. In the case it came out that a fourth private, who was not charged with guarding the brothers, was put into the vehicle especially that evening, and that this private was later known as a "right-wing militant".

We do not know whether this claim was proved in full, because the state never intended to prove it. But we know this: that two publishers who printed the socialist classics were beaten, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, with a speech of "snakes", is too meaningful to be explained by chance. Right beside the piece in which we told what the October Revolution gave the world, the dark face of this anniversary in Turkey also stands.

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The Case: The First Lesson of Impunity

The Military Prosecutor's Office of the Ankara Martial Law Command opened a case against the four privates for "intentional killing", and against the sergeant for "inciting intentional killing". The trial lasted seven years. The result:

Defendant	Charge	First ruling	Final situation
Three guard privates	Intentional killing	10 years 8 months	10 years 8 months
The fourth private (who got into the vehicle although he was not on duty)	Intentional killing	8 years	8 years
Sergeant Şükrü Bağ (who gave the order)	Incitement	10 years 8 months, finalised	The Military Court of Cassation quashed it; 6 months for "neglect of duty"
Prison commander Raci Tetik	—	Not tried	—
The commander who signed the custody decision	—	Not tried	—

The quashing reason of the Military Court of Cassation is worth recording: that it was "impossible" for the sergeant to "see" the beating at the back from the driver's section of the vehicle. The reason for the 6-month sentence given to him in the retrial was that he had not locked the barred door in the vehicle.

A person's death was, in the end, reduced to the matter of a door not being locked.

This table sums up how 12 September worked. The privates at the bottom of the chain, the children of poor peasants and workers, were punished. Those who gave the order, those who built the system, those who drew a political gain from that system, were protected. Impunity was not an exception. It was the method. From Diyarbakır to Metris, from Süleyman Cihan to Nurettin Yedigöl, the same chain was built again and again and sealed with the statute of limitations.

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What Does an Honorable Stand Look Like?

We must be careful when we remember İlhan Erdost as a symbol. He was not someone who made fiery defences in court or shouted slogans on the gallows. He was not even given the chance. He was killed in a vehicle, in the first days of custody. To turn him into a legend of heroism would be unjust both to his reality and to the lesson he left us.

His honour is somewhere else. And for exactly this reason it is more instructive for today's young comrades.

The honour of unshowy labour

İlhan Erdost was not the "visible face" of the left. He was at the press, at distribution, busy with the price of paper, with typesetting, with the parcels that did not reach the bookshop. While his brother was in prison he kept the publishing house standing and provided for the family. He was a person of the organisational labour whose name the movement often does not mention, but without which nothing runs.

The first form of an honorable stand is this: to work not in order to be visible, but because the work has to be done.

Standing behind the work one does

When his brother was arrested in 1971, he could have closed the publishing house and drawn back. He did not close it. Through the 1970s, under seizure orders, 141-142 cases and pressures, he went on printing books. When 12 September came he did not flee and he did not hide; the publishing house and the printing house were both there. He stood behind the books.

The second form of an honorable stand is this: not to give up when the cost rises.

Remaining human

"I came here without being able to bring myself to wake my little daughter." This sentence, spoken on a road going to death, is not a political declaration. But it tells us what a revolutionary is, better than slogans do: someone who can love, who cannot bring himself to wake a child, who tries to protect what belongs to being human. The man the torturer called a "snake" was thinking of his daughter's sleep. Who is human and who is a monster is plain in the comparison of these two sentences.

The third form of an honorable stand is this: not to lose one's humanity even inside cruelty.

Carrying the honour on

And the fourth form is not his honour, but the honour of those who remained. Muzaffer İlhan Erdost changing his name, calling the bookshop "İlhan İlhan", Sol Yayınları not closing and continuing from generation to generation, Leman Sam composing "Ağıt" ("Lament") for him, and the poem "Görülmüştür" ("It Has Been Noted") that Metin Güven wrote in 1981, while the junta still held every place. That poem closes by turning the question of whether a single İlhan died into the question of whether the İlhans, that is, people like him, can die. The poem does not give the answer. We do.

What the torturer wanted	What İlhan Erdost left
The hand that prints books to be afraid	That the books are still being printed today
The name to be forgotten	A brother making that name his own name
The generations to stop reading	A life read again every 7 November
The "snake" stamp to stick	The memory of a person who could not bring himself to wake his daughter
A file closed by impunity	Generations who say "We are owed something for that death"

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Memorial Messages: What Has Been Said for Forty-Six Years

For forty-six years, every 7 November, İlhan Erdost is remembered at his grave in Ankara's Karşıyaka Cemetery. His family, his comrades, writers, poets, lawyers, the people of 1978, and young people who never knew him meet there. What is said at these memorials shows how a single death became the common memory of a generation. Below is a selection of words said over the years.

From the family

His wife Gül Erdost, when the Museum of Shame of 12 September opened in 2011, donated İlhan's photographs and belongings so that young people would see them. She said they felt no grudge and no hatred, that they wanted to be illuminating, and she put plainly where the responsibility lies:

"These soldiers were tools. In that period torture was a state policy, and there were people responsible beyond the privates and the sergeant."

And she added: "Unfortunately, they cannot be tried."

His younger daughter Alaz Erdost, at the 43rd anniversary, told how pain turned into a solidarity:

"We have a very wide family that pains brought together."

His elder daughter Türküler Erdost, at the 45th anniversary, said that her father's silence did not mean an absence for her. She recalled that sometimes falling silent and gathering strength is also a form of resistance.

His elder brother Muzaffer İlhan Erdost repeated the same thing for forty years: this was not an "accident". It was a plot.

"Raci Tetik was a man of the contra-guerrilla. They killed us, by the plot of the contra-guerrilla, on the anniversary of the October Revolution."

From the witnesses

The message of the writer Vahap Erdoğdu, who was in Mamak in those days, read at the 43rd anniversary, carries perhaps the heaviest sentence in this piece:

"İlhan comes to my mind with a bloody coat and a single shoe that they thrust into my hand at Mamak."

And right after:

"İlhan is one of the people that history made."

Işık Kansu, a writer at Cumhuriyet, remembered the funeral in the message read at the same memorial. One sentence tells the junta's climate of fear:

"On a cold and misty day, we gave Erdost to the earth with a few people."

With a few people. Today hundreds gather at his grave. This difference is the measure of the war the junta lost.

From comrades and lawyers

The family friend Oğuz Gemalmaz opened the 45th anniversary with this sentence:

"We are here to defeat the thought that killed İlhan Erdost and had him killed."

The lawyer Şenal Sarıhan, who has sought justice in torture and coup cases since 1971:

"A publisher taken into custody being beaten to death does not coincide in any way with the concept of justice."

The writer Alper Akçam sent his greeting both to the past and to today:

"Greetings to the Erdost brothers; greetings to those who struggle for justice and for freedoms."

Hüseyin Esentürk, of the Revolutionary 78ers Federation, recalled that coups in Turkey are not an exception but an order:

"In our country there is a coup every 10 years."

From the pen

Serdar Değirmencioğlu, in his essay at bianet, told İlhan's last moments and the emptiness he left like this:

"İlhan Erdost, who hurt no one, and those who loved him, were hurt deeply on 7 November 1980."

And he ended his essay with a call:

"Let us say it, so that children are not left without a father, this country without an owner, this people without justice."

Asaf Güven Aksel, in the essay in which he told İlhan's last word, "I cannot breathe", tied it to the sentence that has today become a slogan of remembrance:

"We are owed something for that death."

What do these words say to us?

When we set these memorial messages side by side, a common line appears:

What was said	What it means
"These soldiers were tools"	Responsibility is not at the bottom of the chain but at the top: a state policy
"A wide family that pains brought together"	Pain does not stay individual; it turns into an organised memory
"A bloody coat and a single shoe"	Testimony keeps the concrete detail that official history wants to erase
"We gave him to the earth with a few people"	Fear is temporary; memory grows
"To defeat the thought that killed and had him killed"	A memorial is the name of a struggle, not of a mourning
"We are owed something for that death"	The account is not closed; impunity is not accepted

In none of them is there a call for revenge. In none of them is there surrender either. As Gül Erdost said: not grudge, but illuminating. This too is the form in which an honorable stand is carried on by the family and the comrades.

A memorial message from us

For those who want to share it, a short memorial message as Knowledge Commons:

İlhan Erdost, 17 December 1944 – 7 November 1980

He was a worker of Sol and Onur Yayınları. Because he printed books, he was beaten to death at Mamak, on the anniversary of the October Revolution. Those who killed him thought the book could be silenced; the books are still being printed today, and they are still being read today.

İlhan Erdost is the name of unshowy labour, of the honour that stands behind its work, of remaining human in the face of cruelty.

We are owed something for that death. Knowledge belongs to the people; it cannot be enclosed, it cannot be burned, it cannot be killed.

— Knowledge Commons

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A Memorial Does Not End at the Graveside

As we also wrote in the 12 September dossier: the memory of people who chose this road in a period when no one forced them is kept not by a gravestone, but by the struggle that is carried on, by the institution that is built, and by the task passed to the young comrade. A memorial is not a mourning ceremony. It is a handing over.

The truest way to remember İlhan Erdost is to do what he did: to bring knowledge to the people.

Today books are perhaps not being burned, but there are other methods: access blocks, seized publications, the arrest of journalists, the "disinformation" law, the algorithmic invisibility of platforms, the enclosure of knowledge by walls of copyright and subscription. We discussed these in the pieces we wrote on censorship and internet freedom. The form changed. The substance is the same: to take from the class the tools with which it understands itself.

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Dear Young Comrades,

İlhan Erdost was thirty-six when he died. Those who killed him thought the book could be silenced. They were wrong. The books of Sol Yayınları are still being printed today, and they are still being read. If you are reading these lines, you too are the proof that they were defeated.

What we will learn from him is not a way of dying, but a way of living. To work without show. To stand behind the work you do. Not to scatter when the cost rises. To remain human in the face of cruelty. And to protect knowledge as a commons that no one can enclose.

This year, on 7 November, let us do a few small things:

• Get a Sol Yayınları book and read it. Preferably a classic. Read it together with a friend, and discuss it.
• Set up a reading group, or join one that exists. This was the real aim of the books İlhan printed: to read not alone, but together.
• Share your library. Do not leave the book you read waiting on the shelf; pass it from hand to hand.
• Read the testimonies of 12 September. Give an evening to the Görülmüştür archive of prison letters and to the Memory Museum.
• Speak against impunity. Tie the unacceptability of letting the crimes committed at Mamak, Diyarbakır and Metris fall under the statute of limitations to the solidarity we make today for imprisoned journalists and publishers.
• Give labour to the knowledge commons. A translation, a digitisation, an openly licensed text, an article on Wikipedia. Today's Sol Yayınları is also built from these.

The sergeant at the head of those who killed İlhan received 6 months because he did not lock a door. We will not close the doors he opened.

May his memory live in every book that is read.

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