The Cumartesi Anneleri, the Saturday Mothers, are passing through a police cordon on Istiklal Street in one of Istanbul’s busiest districts. For more than six hundred Saturdays, they have been gathering to share their stories of grief and loss and decry the disappearances of loved ones who vanished in the 1980s and ’90s.

Yet in Turkey now, fresh from last summer’s failed coup, tales of torture and unlawful detention are back. And as the country prepares to vote tomorrow on a series of proposed constitutional amendments, the Saturday demonstrators have updated their protest to reflect the current government’s attacks on the pro-Kurdish movement and attempt to centralize power around President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

On January 7, with snow coming down lightly, Maside Ocak submitted to the requisite bag search and pat-down before entering the protest area on Istiklal Street. She picked up the microphone and spoke of her brother, Hasan, who was taken into custody in 1995. Ocak’s family says his tortured body was buried in an unmarked grave.