“He finished the army,” said Rait Kurt, sitting at a table flanked by pictures of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, whose principles the military has long said it upholds.
“Our biggest protector is the army,” added a friend, Ozdemir Elmas.
“Who shall we trust now?” Kurt asked rhetorically. “Who?”
The resignations last week of Turkey’s top commander, along with heads of the navy, army and air force, seemed for many to bring symbolically to a close the gravest danger to civilian rule here — the penchant for a military to act above the law, as it did in carrying out three coups since 1960 and forcing another government from power in 1997. But to Mr. Erdogan’s critics, particularly among the secular elite, the move demonstrated his ability to exercise control over the country’s key institutions, with the military falling to a relentless crackdown waged by the judiciary on its top ranks.
In Silivri, a town known for its sunflowers and the sprawling prison painted in pastels where some of those officers are being tried, the sentiments are as relentless as the sun on the Sea of Marmara’s beaches, a few minutes away. Heard often in this town of 44,000 an hour’s drive from Istanbul are the fears of his opponents, a political minority, that no one protects them in a country that Mr. Erdogan has governed for eight years.
Ersin Pamuk gestured in the direction of the Silivri Prison, ringed with coils of barbed wire and newly planted pine trees, where one of the military trials is being held.
“If we say anything, they’ll put us there!” he said, laughing.
As he and his family lounged on a narrow beach, he turned more serious.
“Of course, he’s already strong and now he’s becoming stronger,” he said of Mr. Erdogan. “They’re drawing the circle tighter and tighter around us, step by step, and then we’re going to look like Iraq or Iran. No one can challenge his power anymore.”
Since winning its first election in 2002, Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party has overseen a transformation of this country of 73 million, one that is not without detractors. Turkey has emerged as a decisive power in a region long dominated by the United States. Its economy, while still dogged by unemployment, is booming, powered by an insurgent capitalist class that springs from the conservative constituencies in the Anatolian hinterland that Mr. Erdogan, a populist and charismatic figure, has courted.
But even as Turkey becomes more modern and more relevant to the region around it, the old fissures persist, those cleavages of conservative and liberal, nationalist and Islamist, religious and secular. In conversations here, there was a fear that Mr. Erdogan has shifted power decisively away from them. Fear, in fact, seemed to be the driving principle of their opposition: It was less what Mr. Erdogan, a 57-year-old former mayor of Istanbul, had done and more what he might do.
“We’re going toward darkness,” said Battal Sunar, a 58-year-old retiree, relaxing with his family on the beach. “We’re going backwards toward the Ottoman era.”
His wife, Inci, nodded.
“We are really, really worried about our lifestyle,” she said.
Mr. Sunar’s family and others traded stories about the military officer in their building growing more religious, municipal officials trying to curb drinking alcohol in the streets of Istanbul and a foreign policy in the capital, Ankara, which looks more eastward, to the Middle East, than west, to Europe. The foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, once quoted an Ottoman decree in a speech, an occasion that seemed a metaphor for re-engaging an Ottoman past from which modern Turkey had long sought to distance itself.
But even many of Mr. Erdogan’s critics acknowledge that a suspected religious agenda of his party, pious and conservative as it is, has not come to pass. Fear seems more an anxiety over the electoral prowess of the party, and Mr. Erdogan at its center, which represents a coalition of the conservative, disenfranchised and newly wealthy that may keep it in power for years to come. That success has given it unprecedented leverage over the state’s institutions — the courts, universities, news media and, now, the military.
“These people will never go away,” said Mr. Sunar’s daughter, Sevda. “They work hard, they’re smart, they’re well organized and they will bring their own system.”
There are still signs in Turkey that even the old divisions are becoming less important. The party that long acted as the standard-bearer for Mr. Ataturk, who established the modern Turkish state in 1923, now tries to avoid debates over the religious and the secular. Despite its history of fierce nationalism, it has tentatively reached out to the repressed Kurdish minority, who live predominantly in southeastern Turkey.
Polling last year by Iksara, a local firm, found evidence of those old identities being blurred, especially among youth. A third of young people who supported Mr. Erdogan offered Kemalism, the secular ideology of Mr. Ataturk, as one of their identities. About 15 percent of supporters for his chief rival listed Islamist as one of their identities.
Even in Silivri, lines were occasionally crossed. A butcher named Ayhan Yaman, who voted for the main opposition party in elections in June, celebrated what he called Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarianism. He meant it as a compliment.
“You need someone to punch the table and shake it,” he said. “In the past journalists or the military could topple leaders. No one can do anything to him.”
That process of bridging divisions, though, feels tentative, and the fears delivered by the retired men at the tea shop in Silivri were far more common. They were born soon after Mr. Ataturk built the state. In their autumn, they watched as it was transformed.
“We can’t trust the army, we can’t trust the mosque, we can trust the police,” Mr. Kurt said. “Who should we trust? Who? You have to trust someone.”
“The prime minister should be for everyone, for all of us,” said another friend, Muharrem Yuksel. “But they don’t treat everyone equally. They’re not impartial at all.”
He paused for a moment, then spoke again.
“We hope God will help us,” he said.
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