Ziverbey Villa

The Ziverbey Villa, known in Turkish as Ziverbey Köşkü, was a villa in Erenköy, a district of Istanbul, that became notorious as an interrogation center after the military memorandum of 12 March 1971. The house was used by the Special Warfare Department and by others associated with the Counter-Guerrilla, and the people held there were mostly drawn from the political left. Prisoners were bound and blinded, and the writer İlhan Selçuk famously signalled that he was under torture by hiding a message in the opening letters of the penultimate word of each sentence of a forced statement. The available sources name no architect, style or date of construction, only the use made of the villa. It was demolished in the 1990s, and a monument to the victims of torture was erected in front of the site in 2013.