The 31 March Incident (Turkish: 31 Mart Vakası or 31 Mart Olayı) was a 1909 rebellion of reactionaries in İstanbul against the restoration of constitutional system that had taken place in 1908. It took place on 13 April 1909 (31 March on the Rumi calendar in use at the time in Turkey for official timekeeping). The countercoup had attempted to put an end to the nascent Second Constitutional Era in the Ottoman Empire and to the newly established influence of the Committee of Union and Progress, in order to re-affirm the position of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II as absolute monarch.
The incident was a milestone in the Turkish military's encroaching on the political sphere.
Famous quotes containing the words march and/or incident:
“The march of the human mind is slow.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“I teazed him with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, “That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.””
—James Boswell (1740–1795)