Turmoil in Turkey has entered its fifth straight day as protests over the destruction of trees in a public park morphed into an indictment of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government.

And the "lady in red" — a woman who was sprayed directly in the face with teargas by a policeman on May 28 in Gezi Park of Taksim Square — has become the symbol of the dissidents.

The description of the photo by Reuters nails it (emphasis ours):

In her red cotton summer dress, necklace and white bag slung over her shoulder she might have been floating across the lawn at a garden party; but before her crouches a masked policeman firing teargas spray that sends her long hair billowing upwards.

Endlessly shared on social media and replicated as a cartoon on posters and stickers, the image of the woman in red has become the leitmotif for female protesters during days of violent anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul.

Birsen Altayli and Ayla Jean Yackley of Reuters report that walls around Taksim Square in the heart of Istanbul — a popular gathering place for the country's labor movement where Erdogan vows to build a mosque — are plastered with posters of the instantly iconic photo along with a message that read: "The more they spray, the bigger we get."

And the police have been spraying, as well as aggressively shooting demonstrators with water cannons, and in some instances savagely beating them.

The Turkish Medical Association claimed at least 3,195 people were injured in clashes Sunday and Monday — two have been killed — and some of the images that appear to show wounded protesters are downright grisly (warning: very graphic link).

On Tuesday Turkey's deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc apologized for "excessive violence" against the protesters while Erdogan remains defiant — he's blamed the unrest on "bums," "looters," the "extremist fringe," "Twitter," the main opposition party, and even "foreign agents," while also predicting that "the situation will return to normal" in a matter of days.

“[Erdogan has] not been behaving rationally at all,” Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told USA Today. “He appears to be becoming almost delusional and refusing to accept the reality that these protests are mainly spontaneous and are being organized by small groups of people who’ve never engaged in politics before.”

No moment captures that spontaneous defiance and the police's heavy-handed response better than the lady in red.

Here's the sequence:



REUTERS/Osman Orsal

And here's a closeup of her getting doused: