Murat C. Yıldız’s The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul is the first “multilingual, multiethnic, and multireligious” history of sports in the late Ottoman Empire (p. 3). It dives into an underexplored terrain of Ottoman history that profoundly shaped the lives of the last Ottoman generation, from the late 1890s through 1923. Combining Ottoman sports club histories with personal biographies, Yıldız analyzes the birth of a new sports regime in the empire’s capital city, geared toward the moral and physical development of Ottoman youth. What unfolds is a growing Ottoman enthusiasm to promote sports as a professional activity and personal hobby among Istanbul’s middle-class Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations. As the book argues, sports became integral to the formation of late Ottoman identity, and negotiating masculinity, nationalism, and modernization in the final three decades of the empire’s existence. Ottoman subjects imagined sports as the key to achieving “national greatness” domestically and globally in the face of mounting Ottoman intercommunal tensions and severe international pressure. Spanning eight chapters in addition to an introduction and a conclusion, the book traces the emergence of a new Ottoman physical culture in the imperial capital at the dawn of the 20th century. It depicts Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman elements investing in sports with the hope of establishing a modern political order compatible with so-called Western civilization.
The Ottoman world of sports was, indeed, the culmination of multiple synergies between individuals, institutions, ideas, and objects, which operated in unison to give it its shape and meaning. Yıldız showcases the state and the empire’s diverse communities as they venture into the making of the Ottoman world of sports by founding a dozen of new publications, purchasing athletic equipment, opening sports clubs, building stadiums, and enforcing compulsory physical education in Ottoman school curricula. Under the spotlight are the legacies of Armenian Shavarsh Chrissian, Turkish Selim Sırrı, Jewish Albert Ziffer, and British Muslim convert Ahmet Robenson. These “sports nuts,” as one chapter is titled, among others, held a pioneering role in formalizing European-style sports within their respective communities and in Ottoman society at large. Yıldız elucidates the importance of ethnically mixed sports clubs like Istanbul’s Galatasaray, which brought Ottoman athletes and sports fans together in a single space, universalizing the experience of Ottoman physical culture. Visual culture was a big part of this and was used by the state and sports enthusiasts to shape a new generation of Ottoman athletes. It is also an important component of this book. In a rare precedent for a historian, Yıldız utilizes a vast selection of these images (fifty in total), mostly extracted from Ottoman periodicals and photographic albums, to tell this fascinating story of Ottoman sports, treating them as relics of the past and highlighting their historical value as meaningful sources for knowledge production.
Yıldız pieces together a rich and detailed account of the athletic pursuits of Ottomans often erased or contested in post-Ottoman public memory under the guise of the new Turkish nation–state. The book rewrites the narrative of sports in Turkey, setting forth for the first time an inclusive history through groundbreaking multilingual research in Armenian, Ladino, Greek, and Ottoman Turkish from across more than twenty conventional and nonconventional archives. Reading Ottoman state records in tandem with and against postcards, photographs, memoirs, sports club reports, personal papers, and family collections, Yıldız underlines the innovative contributions of Turkish and non-Turkish sports enthusiasts—driven by love, passion, and competition—in spearheading Istanbul’s physical culture. The book challenges the nationalist currents that impose a monolithic view on this past and deny the multicultural roots of sports in pre-republican Turkey. As Yıldız insightfully states in his “Pregame,” he discovered through the research process the difficulty of “coming up with a singular origin to Istanbul’s sports clubs” (p. xxi). He reinscribes that diversity in the scholarship, and back into Turkish public consciousness.
Through rigorous visual and textual analysis, Ottoman World of Sports lays out the underlying tensions that determined the profile and function of Ottoman sports across ethnonational lines and religion. All major demographic groups of Istanbul’s cosmopolitan population are represented on the pages of this book. Yıldız captures the significant role of physical culture in inventing and defining “community” in late Ottoman society. Partaking in Ottoman sports helped solidify ethnic differences between Istanbulites of diverse origins as much as it occasioned “mixed social mingling” between the city’s cosmopolitan populations coming in contact with one another on the field (p. 17). Sports was observed as a civic practice that glued communities together, while also forging a universal sense of Ottoman identity for Istanbul’s middle-class Muslim and non-Muslim youth. Ironically, it also generated pan-Ottoman fears of a militaristic strength, empowering some groups over others at the empire’s expense.
The nationalist anxieties that dominated the Ottoman sports culture are well scrutinized in Ottoman World of Sports. Throughout the book and particularly in Chapters 7 and 8, Yıldız highlights the active involvement of the Ottoman state and communal authorities in institutionalizing a regular sports routine for Istanbul’s middle-class youth. The Ottoman government, thanks to Selim Sırrı’s persistent efforts, opened a physical training school to prepare an army of competent teachers capable of arousing Muslim students’ fascination with sports inside the classroom. It was deemed important to train Ottoman youth in new varieties of sporting activities, such as gymnastics and football, which the author discusses individually in separate chapters. Outside the classroom, Muslims and non-Muslims were presented with the opportunity to join ethnic sports clubs to deepen their athletic endeavors. The 1908 Ottoman regime change included a vibrant sports scene in Istanbul, produced by competing nationalist ideals manifested in the realm of sports.
Beyond the framework of pure political histories, Yıldız’s athletic history unveils the complicated intercommunal coexistence of Ottomanism and evolving sectarian relations. As he explains, Ottoman sports easily slipped from a lively amusement to serious political performance during domestic games and at international tournaments, contrary to the direct intentions of its pioneers. The question of representation in Ottoman athletics grew louder in the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, when stadiums turned into “centers of political theater” (p. 179). One such incident occurred during the Olympic Games of 1912, when the arrival in Sweden of an Ottoman delegation composed of two Armenian male athletes inspired major public debates surrounding who exactly the Ottoman team represented. Armenians recorded Vahram Papazian and Migirdich Migirian’s participation in Stockholm on behalf of the Ottoman Empire as a national victory for subjugated non-Muslim and non-Turkish minority populations. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turkish majority was appalled by the non-Muslim representation, deliberately erasing the ethnic identity of the Armenian athletes, with some even expressing outrage that “there was not one from us” (p. 216). The cracks in Ottoman unity were exposed, as was the prevalence of ethnonational forms of identification over religion, which has been an understudied phenomenon in the historiography. Upon reading this book, there is no escaping that ethnocentrism reigned over the Ottoman world of sports in a looming nationalist climate beginning in the late 19th century. The final scores were of less significance than the ethnicities of the Ottoman sportsmen involved.
Gender and class were integral to the anatomy of sports in late Ottoman Istanbul, dominating discourses about sportsmanship over three decades. Yıldız emphasizes the gendered component of the research by demonstrating that Ottoman sports culture targeted primarily “young men from the elite and upwardly mobile middle classes” (p. 3). In fact, Ottoman World of Sports is among the few exciting studies that historicize the entangled construction of masculinity, nationalism, and sports in this way. It examines the gendered body politics of Ottoman communities that envisaged the nurturance of stronger and fitter male bodies as part of their modernization blueprint and inclusion in the Ottoman body politic. The gendered analysis of sports and nationalism, however, is occasionally lost to a greater fixation on minor details, such as the logistics of athletic games, instead of focusing on the athletes’ positionality within the larger picture of international power structures. More explicit connections between masculinity, nationalism, and sportsmanship in conversation with the literature on masculinity studies or global histories of sports might draw parallels between these developments in Western and non-Western imperial contexts.
All in all, Ottoman World of Sports is a welcome contribution to Ottoman and Middle East studies. It serves the needs of academic and nonacademic “sports nuts” interested in learning about and uncovering the history of sports in the region. The book also will be useful to scholars studying minorities, nationalism, and gender in the modern Middle East, given its extensive coverage of diverse non-Muslim perspectives, including Ottoman Armenian, Greek, and Jewish perspectives. Through well-grounded research and engagement with what he calls “unconventional archives,” Yıldız has produced a commendable work on the development of late Ottoman sports culture in Istanbul. His linguistic strengths, reliance on official and nonofficial records, and careful examination of visual materials are impressive. The book is testimony to the rich sports heritage of Turkey that has been disrupted by war, genocide, and displacement.
