Turkey is commemorating the tenth anniversary of the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, a single night of violence in which more than 250 people — most of them civilians — were killed as rebel soldiers attacked parliament and fought on the Bosphorus Bridge (the iconic suspension bridge linking Europe and Asia in Istanbul). The putsch collapsed within hours, but its aftermath proved transformative: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used it to consolidate sweeping executive power, a system critics call hyper-presidentialism, while officially enshrining the events as the "July 15 Epic" in national memory. Over the past decade, the coup's legacy has fundamentally reordered Turkey's domestic balance of power and reshaped its foreign relations.