What happened
On the morning of 8 August 1938, in the village of Kılıçkaya (historically known as Sürbahan) in Erzincan province of eastern Turkey, ninety-seven villagers were rounded up in a converted police station and executed by firing squad at a mountain pass called Zini Gediği.
The killings took place as part of the late phase of the Dersim operations (1937-38), a large-scale military campaign against the predominantly Alevi-Zaza population of the Dersim region. Following the September 1937 execution of Seyit Rıza, the leader of the Dersim uprising, military sweeps continued into the following year, spilling into surrounding areas.
Because of the scale of loss in Kılıçkaya, locals came to call it "Küçük Dersim" — Little Dersim.
The silence
The massacre appears in no official Turkish record. It is absent from history textbooks. For decades, it survived only as a whispered family memory in the villages of the region and among descendants deported to Balıkesir and Keşan in western Turkey.
2011: The bones surface
In September 2011, soil erosion brought human bones to the surface at the massacre site. Descendants of the victims, with legal counsel, filed a formal petition with the Erzincan Chief Public Prosecutor's Office on 9 September 2011, asking for the mass grave to be excavated and identified through DNA testing.
The petition was rejected. Applications to the European Court of Human Rights followed. Since that year, a group of families, activists and researchers — chief among them journalist Erdal Kılıçkaya, whose family is from the village — has gathered at the site each summer to hold a commemoration.
88th anniversary — 8 August 2026
This site was created to consolidate the photographic, documentary and testimonial record of the Zini Gediği massacre, and to prepare for the 88th anniversary commemoration on 8 August 2026.
It gathers photographs from annual commemorations (2008–2018), original posters, letters, court filings, press coverage, and written testimonies from descendants including Süleyman Çetinkaya, Ezgi Aslan, İlhami Algor and others.
A book by Erdal Kılıçkaya is in preparation.
Get in touch
If you have information, testimony, photographs or documentary material about the massacre or its commemorations, we would be grateful to hear from you: