Turkey's main opposition leader on Saturday begins hosting a four day "justice congress" in a bid to keep up the momentum from the success of a month-long foot march protesting against alleged injustices under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, head of the secular Republican People's Party (CHP), is holding the congress at an open-air site in the northwestern province of Canakkale, with sessions each day focusing on different rights violations in Turkey.
With politics heating up in Turkey even two years before the next elections, Erdogan will on Saturday host a mass rally at the opposite end of the country marking the anniversary of the 1071 Battle of Malazgirt where pre-Ottoman tribes defeated the Byzantines.
The pick of the region for the CHP congress is also significant as it was the site of the World War I Battle of Gallipoli where the Ottoman army successfully repelled Allied forces.
The CHP was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was a Turkish commander in the Gallipoli campaign where the heroism of Turkish troops is said to have helped lay the foundation of the modern republic.
Kilicdaroglu earlier this summer walked 450 kilometres (280 miles) from Istanbul to Ankara to protest against the sentencing of one of his MPs, Enis Berberoglu, to 25 years in jail for leaking classified information to an opposition newspaper.
Under the simple slogan "justice", the march culminated last month in a huge rally in Istanbul that attracted hundreds of thousands, the biggest event staged by Erdogan's critics in years. READ MORE
