17 September 2026 marks 65 years since the execution of Adnan Menderes, prime minister of Turkey from 1950 to 1960. Encyclopaedia Britannica records the date of death as 17 September 1961, on İmralı island. Menderes had led the government after the Democratic Party’s 1950 victory; on 27 May 1960 the army seized power, and he and other Democrat leaders were arrested.

The Yassıada trials followed, before a special court set up after the coup. Menderes was sentenced to death. Former ministers Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan were executed on 16 September 1961; Menderes’s sentence was carried out the next day, also by hanging, on İmralı. This account does not judge the trial or his government; it records documented facts and the historically recognised controversy of the executions.

His years in office included major economic and social policies and increasingly sharp conflict with the opposition. Those elements appear in reference accounts, but they are not turned here into a verdict on guilt or legitimacy.

Decades later, Turkey’s parliament adopted Law No. 3623 of 11 April 1990, rehabilitating the memory of Menderes, Zorlu and Polatkan and allowing their remains to be moved from İmralı to a mausoleum in Istanbul on 17 September 1990. Yassıada was later renamed Democracy and Freedom Island.

An anniversary text should keep separate the date, place, legal setting of the time and the later rehabilitation. RoAdevăr does not offer a judgment on the 1960 coup.

Sixty-five years after 17 September 1961, the case remains a reference point for the history of relations between civilian institutions and military intervention in twentieth-century Turkey.

Image: Erdalkara, portrait of Adnan Menderes at the Democracy Museum, 7 April 2024. Wikimedia Commons, CC0. Not a photograph of the execution. Cropped to 16:9.

Source consulted: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Adnan Menderes; DergiPark — Adnan Menderes’in yargılanması ve idamı.