On 2 July 1993 , 37 participants in an Alevi cultural and literary festival were killed when a mob of demonstrators set fire to the Madimak hotel in Sivas during a violent protest by some 15,000 members of various radical Islamist groups against the presence of Aziz Nesin . The deaths resulted in the Turkish government taking a harder stance against religious fanaticism , militant Islam , and antisecularism . In late 2006 , there was a campaign by the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Institute to convert the former hotel into a museum to commemorate the tragedy , now known as the Sivas massacre
Sivas massacre
Sivas massacre
Sivas