Wacht op mij, galg! Het verhaal van Sivas

Every year Sivas, the town in Central Anatolia, serves as the centre for a political cultural festival in honour of the Alevitic poet and popular hero Pir Sultan Abdal. It was in the summer of 1993 that Alevitic writers and journalists, politicians and artists had gathered at the Madimak hotel in the centre of Sivas for the annual Pir Sultan Abdal commemoration ceremony. The hotel is ablaze in a fire raised by muslim fundamentalists.Only after ten hours did the authorities decide to take action. By that time viewers watching the live broadcast on local Turkish TV had witnessed how thirty-seven people burned to death alive.The Pir Sultan Abdals statue in Banaz stands on his pedestal armed with a lute. In the region of Sivas war is waged mainly through singing and dancing. Sivas is the land of the saz, the lute that sounds the charges of musical resistance and is the weapon of minorities. A straight line runs from Pir Sultan Abdal and the thirty-seven Sivas dead. They include the Pir the Sultan Abdals of today.