Just before 10 p.m. on 15 July 2016, both bridges over the Bosphorus shut to traffic. Soldiers had closed them. Over Ankara, F-16s were flying low enough to shake the windows, and gunfire had already started at the military's own headquarters.
A faction inside the Turkish Armed Forces was trying to seize the country. It called itself the Peace at Home Council. Behind it stood FETÖ, the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization, a clandestine network built over decades by Fethullah Gülen, a cleric who directed it from Pennsylvania.
The attempt failed. By the next midday it had been broken in the streets, beaten back by police, by soldiers who stayed loyal, and by unarmed people who came out and walked toward the tanks. It killed 253 people and wounded 2,737 more.
The night, hour by hour
Reuters timed each event in GMT as it reported it. Anadolu Ajansı and Daily Sabah logged the same sequence in local time, and the two line up. Türkiye's official account compresses the first hours, placing the seizure of the airwaves and the junta's declaration in the 10 p.m. hour. The times below are local, drawn from the contemporaneous reporting, fixed to the minute where the record fixes them and approximate where it does not.
- Around 10 p.m., 15 July. Soldiers close the Bosphorus Bridge and the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge in Istanbul. F-16s and helicopters run low passes over Ankara, and gunfire breaks out at the General Staff headquarters.
- Around 11 p.m. Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım goes on live television to say a group inside the military is trying to overthrow the government.
- Approaching midnight. Troops seize the state broadcaster TRT and take the Chief of the General Staff, General Hulusi Akar, hostage. A statement signed the "Peace at Home Council" goes out over the military's website and TRT, declaring martial law and a curfew across the country.
- Just after midnight, 16 July. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reaches CNN Türk by phone, held up to the camera on a video call, and tells people to fill the streets and the squares. He says he is on his way back to Ankara.
- Around 1 a.m. At the Special Forces Command near Ankara, a pro-coup general, Semih Terzi, is shot dead by a non-commissioned officer, Ömer Halisdemir, who is killed moments later. The command never falls to the plotters.
- Roughly 1 to 3:30 a.m. The coup turns its weapons on the state. Tanks fire on the Grand National Assembly, and F-16s bomb the parliament building while members shelter inside. The police special-operations headquarters at Gölbaşı is bombed. Anadolu Ajansı reported 17 police killed there; Reuters noted at the time that the figure had no independent confirmation.
- Around 3:20 a.m. Erdoğan's plane lands at Istanbul's Atatürk Airport. He walks out to a waiting crowd and speaks over their heads, telling them to hold the streets.
- In the early morning. On one of the Bosphorus bridges, the soldiers give up. They climb down from their tanks with their hands raised, filmed live in the morning light. It becomes the image of the night.
- Around 8:30 a.m. General Akar is freed from the plotters who held him.
- By midday. Yıldırım announces that the coup attempt has been put down. Surrenders and arrests run through the rest of the day.
What the night left
Türkiye's official count is 253 dead: 184 civilians, 63 police officers, and six soldiers who stood with the government. Another 2,737 people were wounded. At the tenth anniversary this July, a line of 253 boats sailed up the Bosphorus, one for every person killed.
Türkiye turned the night into memory quickly. The Bosphorus Bridge, where the soldiers surrendered, is now the 15 July Martyrs' Bridge. That October the government named 15 July a national holiday, Democracy and National Unity Day, and on 20 July 2016 it had already declared a state of emergency that would run for two years.
The reckoning came after, and it ran for years: the arrests, the dismissals from public jobs, the trials still moving through the courts a decade on. That decade became its own long story.