Guli Temir

Gul Demir
Born	May 1, 1802 Samakent, Uluujol
Died	October 16, 1863 Ozh, Uluujol
Nationality	Uluujoli, Chuyan
Spouse(s)	Ogun Demir
Parents	Dursun Karadere (father) Toprak Onut (mother)

Gul Demir was a 19th century official, reformer, and revolutionary in Uluujol. An official of the Khaganate working in the governance of the [region] region, Demir compiled a number of writings on constitutionalism, limited government, as well as many ideas that would later be recognized as part of a larger socialist tradition. Although Gul's earlier writings focused mostly on the need for legal limitations on the power of the Khagan of Uluujol and the care and protection owed by the aristocracy and imperial family to their social subordinates, as the pace of industrialization grew in the Khaganate her rhetoric and views became more radical, calling increasingly for the cooperative ownership of land by farmers and of the nation's new infrastructure by its people, as well as the democratic input of those people. Likely recognizing the inflammatory nature of her works, she consciously left them mostly unpublished for much of her life, although beginning in the 1830's her friends and colleagues began to disseminate them as anonymous pamphlets.

In 1856, at the culmination of a long career in the governing bureaucracy of the Khaganate, Demir was named as Imperial Governor of the province of Tali. With significant latitude from Khagan Cuyen II, she instituted some of the first substantial social safetynets in the Khaganate, as well as reforming local laws to protect workers, resulting in her significant popularity. However, she increasingly fell out with Cuyen's sucessor, Khagan Nikan III, who both feared her personal popularity as well as many of the precedents she was setting, and he removed her from her post in 1860.

Demir's removal resulted in significant civil unrest, especially once the replacement selected by Nikan began rolling back several of her reforms. Although the authorship of her anonymous papers had been speculated on since before the beginning of her administration, at this point she publicly confessed her authorship. Adding this to the already simmering unrest in Tali (rapidly spreading to other provinces, as well), rioters and fighters increasingly began bearing flags and badges with a silver rose, in reference to her own nickname of "the Iron Rose", and the fighters and agitators increasingly began to refer to themselves as "the Iron Rose Army".

Demir was captured in 1862 and brought to Ozhe for trial, after which she was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Though she was executed early in 1863, the uprising would last from 1861 until its violent suppression in 1864.

Legacy

Although Demir's writings were formally banned and suppressed by the Uluujoli government as soon as they began to circulate, her works continue to circulate today, and have had an influence on contemporary and subsequent leftist movements in Ochran. The ideology put forward by her works and her immediate successors from the Iron Rose Uprising is often referred to as Gulism, and she is still often discretely honored throughout the Khaganate.

In addition, her impact is felt through the later writings of Nader Celovi, whose own school of thought (now known as Celovism) advocated for an "enlightened despotism" from the Khagan and the creation of a welfare state that would alleviate the conditions that led to the Iron Rose Uprising. Celovism is still one of the more common philosophies of government found among the bureaucracy and court of Uluujol.