Kenan Evren, former Turkish military dictator

Turkey has yet to escape the influence of Kenan Evren, a former president who brutally transformed the country in the 1980s.

Evren, who died on Saturday aged 97, came to power in 1980 through a military coup - the third and perhaps most significant such putsch in Turkey's modern history.

While the army has sometimes been seen in the country as the safeguard of secularism, Evren's takeover sought, and failed, to use Islam for its own ends.

The military takeover was notoriously bloody, featuring widespread torture, hundreds of deaths in prison and 50 executions, including that of a 17-year-old boy. There were more than half a million arrests. Yet because it ended a period of political instability in which street violence had claimed thousands of lives, it was initially welcomed by many Turks. Playing on such sentiments, Evren himself once famously exclaimed: "Should we feed the terrorists rather than hang them?"

The country has seen no full-blown military takeover since. Although the army effectively pushed an Islamist-led government from power in 1997 and issued threats against incumbents as late as 2007, a serving general has not occupied the president's chair.

But in three years of unabashed military rule, Evren, a former chief of staff, fundamentally changed Turkey's course, with propagandists speaking of a "Turkish-Islamic synthesis".

Under his leadership, the military embarked on a campaign to, at least to some extent, re-Islamicise the formally secular country, embarking on a widescale mosque-construction programme, increasing religious education and carefully supervising the sermons of the country's imams. The push was intended to forestall both Iranian-style Islamist radicalism and 1970s leftism. But instead it contributed to the burgeoning of political Islam - which became the army's most formidable enemy.

The 1983 elections that returned the country to civilian rule were won by Turgut Ozal, a former senior official - and not one of Erzel's preferred candidates - who went on to open Turkey's economy to the world. But the generals had already turned the country's politics upside down, closing down political parties, banning trade unions and repressing Kurdish rights. This last wave of measures set the stage for a three-decade Kurdish conflict that has claimed some 40,000 lives and is still not resolved.

It was also under Evren that Turkey promulgated the constitution that still governs the country today - a 1982 document widely criticised as putting state rights ahead of individual rights and linking Turkish citizenship to ethnicity. Despite numerous revisions over the years, all the country's major parties now agree the document should be junked, although they have not yet settled on what should replace it.

Although Evren's constitution remains in place, he himself experienced a reversal of fortune in his final years.

Keen to exit formal power but also to set the rules of the game, as the military had done after previous coups, he remained president, with Ozal as his prime minister, until 1989. For well over a decade after that the military remained the main power in the country - until Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the present, Islamist-rooted president, curbed its influence.

Then, after a 2010 constitutional change lifted the 1980 coup leaders' immunity from prosecution, the former dictator finally went on trial. He was sentenced to life imprisonment last year, although due to his advanced age, he remained in a military hospital until his death.

Many critics argued more needed to be done to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 1980 putsch than merely prosecuting Evren and a fellow elderly former junta member. Others noted that far more people had been brought to trial over alleged and possibly fabricated coup plots, in cases that have now collapsed.

Still, in one way or another Evren himself was finally held to account - even if Turkish society has yet to come to a reckoning with the largely toxic legacy he leaves behind.

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