Qualla: 1965 Hendek Bus Accident

1965 Hendek Bus Accident: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the early hours of 11 August 1965, most of the passengers aboard the bus called Sinemalı Civan were asleep. The D-100 highway ran dark between Istanbul and Ankara, and the bus had been moving through the night in the way long-distance buses do — steadily, the landscape invisible outside the windows, the travelers resting toward wherever they were going. Near the village of Kargalıhanbaba in the Hendek district of Sakarya Province, that journey ended. Twenty-five people who boarded that bus did not reach their destination.

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1965 Hendek Bus Accident: Before Dawn on the D-100

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At around 3:15 in the morning, driver Özdemir Süer guided the Civan Turizm coach east along the D-100. Ahead, stationary on the roadside, sat a tanker truck that had broken down with a shaft malfunction. The truck, driven by Mustafa Filik, was carrying nitric acid. The collision ...

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1965 Hendek Bus Accident: The Suffering of Those Who Tried to Help Themselves

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What followed was a sequence of tragedies built on misunderstanding. The passengers who left the bus and felt the burning of the acid on their skin looked for water — the instinctive remedy for any burning. There was water nearby, mixed into the puddle that the spill had already ...

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1965 Hendek Bus Accident: Who Were They

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The passengers on the Sinemalı Civan were people in transit — the ordinary population of long-distance bus travel: people going to work, to family, to a destination they had chosen. The presence of passengers from the United States and Lebanon suggests the bus served an internati...

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1965 Hendek Bus Accident: The Memorial Cemetery

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The eighteen who died at the scene were buried in a pit dug by villagers ten meters from the accident site, by necessity, in the hours after the crash. The village imam conducted the funeral prayers there. In the years that followed, the families of those killed came to that plac...

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