From open prison to no-fly zone: How İmralı became Turkey’s most symbolic island

From open prison to no-fly zone: How İmralı became Turkey’s most symbolic island (File image)

Sweeping low over the Sea of Marmara in a security-cleared helicopter, three Turkish politicians travelled last month to a place heavy with symbolism. Their destination was İmralı, a small, isolated island that has absorbed some of the country’s most painful political history and now sits, once again, at the centre of an uncertain national moment.

Waiting for them was Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, held in solitary confinement on the island for 26 years. Öcalan has long been a figure of deep hostility for many Turks and a central reference point for Kurds. The conflict associated with his movement has lasted four decades and claimed an estimated 40,000 lives, the Financial Times reported.

“The gods of the ancient myths could probably never have thought of a worse punishment for me than tying me to the rocks of İmralı,” Öcalan wrote in a letter in 2010.

Today, İmralı is almost inseparable from his name. In that sense, it has joined a grim lineage of islands defined by confinement: Robben Island and Nelson Mandela, Devil’s Island and Alfred Dreyfus, St Helena and Napoleon. Yet historians say İmralı has carried multiple meanings over time, many now forgotten.

From rehabilitation to punishment

İmralı lies just 6 kilometres long in the Sea of Marmara, west of the Bosphorus. Before it became synonymous with political imprisonment, it was home to silk farmers, fishermen and an abandoned monastery. In 1935, the Turkish state turned it into an open prison designed around rehabilitation rather than punishment.

Prisoners worked the land and lived without guards, separated from society only by water. Accounts from the period describe a strangely communal life. Inmates formed a football team, a film club and even produced a local newspaper.

Billy Hayes, the American smuggler later made famous by the film Midnight Express, served time there in the 1970s. In letters home, he marvelled at the island’s natural beauty while admitting to deep loneliness. Hayes later rejected the film adaptation of his story, calling it a distortion that Turks themselves found offensive.

Among İmralı’s inmates was also Yılmaz Güney, one of Turkey’s most important filmmakers. While imprisoned, he conceived Yol, later completed through instructions sent from jail and awarded the Palme d’Or in 1982.

A place of political reckoning

Long before Öcalan arrived, İmralı was already marked by political trauma. It was the execution site of Adnan Menderes, Turkey’s first democratically elected prime minister, overthrown in the 1960 military coup. After a humiliating trial on a nearby island, Menderes was hanged at İmralı in 1961.

Only decades later, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was Menderes fully rehabilitated in the national narrative. The island where he was tried was renamed “Democracy and Freedom”, a symbolic reversal that underscored how Turkish politics reinterprets its past.

İmralı, by contrast, became sealed off. It is now surrounded by a militarised exclusion zone, its single prisoner a reminder of a conflict neither resolved nor erased.

A frozen peace process

In recent years, İmralı has been linked to what became known as the “İmralı process”, intermittent attempts to negotiate an end to the Kurdish conflict. Some historians argue the island’s layered past offers lessons about apology, reinvention and political courage.

Others are more sceptical. Turkey’s peace efforts appear stalled, even as the government speaks of a “terror-free Turkey”. Öcalan told visiting MPs last month that the PKK should have dissolved in 1993, suggesting unnamed forces blocked it. Senior PKK figures later rejected the idea of apology, saying no crimes had been committed.

The Turkish state, meanwhile, remains unyielding. Alongside Öcalan, Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a leading opposition figure, is also in prison, awaiting trial and potentially facing an extraordinary sentence.

An island of competing meanings

İmralı today carries different meanings depending on who is asked. For many Kurds, it represents leadership and political vision. For many Turks, it symbolises state triumph over separatism. Its earlier stories of rehabilitation and creativity are largely absent from public memory.

Yet islands retain a powerful hold on Turkey’s imagination. In fiction, writers such as Yaşar Kemal imagined islands as places where fractured lives could be remade. Whether İmralı can ever serve that role in reality remains unclear.

For now, it stands as a place where Turkey locked away not only a man, but much of its unresolved past — and where the future still waits offshore.