The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Europa Conference League Final 2024 took place in Athens, Greece, at the newly built stadium of the AEK Football Club (Athlitiki Enosis Konstantinoupoleos [Athletic Union of Constantinople] Football Club). The new stadium’s name, Agia Sophia, is a reference to the club’s origins in İstanbul. To the discerning eye, such references are ubiquitous in the professional sports scene in Turkey and Greece. The multiethnic history of sports in the region is often instrumentalized in a variety of political discourses, ranging from vulgarization of communal animosities to romanticization of intercommunal relationships. In his book, The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul, Murat C. Yıldız takes up the challenge to explore how İstanbul’s residents created an “Ottoman world of sports,” while avoiding romanticization of the multiethnic character of that world. He treats the sports scene as both a reflection of and a contributor to the social and political changes that late Ottoman İstanbul underwent, particularly the ways in which Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Turkish communities fashioned their identities. Throughout the book, he demonstrates that each ethnoreligious community promoted and instrumentalized sports to cultivate young, educated men who would build and represent their communities. At the same time, the world of sports wove civic bonds between them, creating new ties and interactions.
Yıldız’s study joins a growing body of scholarship that moves beyond the traditional reliance on the Ottoman state archives. He takes up an immense task in locating and examining documents regarding the Ottoman world of sports not only in state archives, but also in museums and private collections. Written in various languages, including Armenian, Greek, Ladino, and Ottoman Turkish, these sources enable him to explore the diversity of individual and communal experiences and thus highlight the complexity of the subject under study.
The book begins by tracing the origins of the sports scene. Yıldız argues that the integration of gymnastics into the curriculum of modern schools constituted the first step. He demonstrates how self-made physical educators of varied backgrounds shared similar conceptions on the benefits of sports for young men’s physical and moral development. Chapter 2 focuses on sports clubs, which quickly became central to the sporting scene. Organized mostly around ethnoreligious identities, they sought to cultivate educated, moral, and ambitious middle-class men within their own communities. At the same time, their similar structures, values, and activities created a shared experience for a generation of İstanbulites.
The next chapter focuses on individuals, specifically the above-mentioned educators, whom Yıldız refers as a “new type of reformer” because they succeeded in spreading the interest for sports beyond schools and clubs through public lectures and print media. Focusing on four individuals – Shavarsh Chrissian, Ahmet Robenson, Selim Sırrı, and Albert Ziffer – with different ethnoreligious backgrounds, he highlights the opportunities for intercommunal interaction in the capital that enabled them to develop a common language and rapport. Chapter 4 delves into the life of one of these four, Selim Sırrı, showing how he played a central role in integrating physical education into the modern curricula of the Ottoman Empire’s schools. Yıldız notes that this transformation made physical education expertise a valued profession.
Chapter 5 demonstrates that İstanbul’s multilinguistic press gradually became more interested in sports. After the 1908 Revolution, İstanbul developed its own sports press featuring periodicals published in Armenian, Ladino, Greek, and Ottoman–Turkish. Yıldız argues that these publications actively shaped the figure of the sportsman, connecting it to global and imperial themes, and further defining it in gendered terms. The gradual expansion of sports coverage in the press was due to the increasing popularity of sports, and football was the main spectator sport in the capital, as Chapter 6 illustrates. By 1905, the city had its own football league, which initially consisted of non-Muslim teams but gradually developed into a mixed league. Yıldız gives particular attention to sporting venues and shows how the construction of Union Club Stadium, located in the Asian side of the city, created a shared space for the multiethnic football scene. He argues that the spectators developed not only a set of shared habits and chants in the stands, but also expectations of behavior and performance from players on the field. However, he avoids overstating the existence of shared experiences by demonstrating how each community’s press framed teams as Armenian, Greek, or Turkish. His account also shows how the Ottoman–Turkish press took a step further, adopting the Committee of Union and Progress’s (CUP) increasingly exclusionary definition of being Ottoman, criticizing clubs like Galatasaray and Fenerbahce for having non-Muslim players.
This sets the tone for the rest of the book as Yıldız moves on in the following chapters to focus on the post-1908 period. In Chapter 7, he contends that the expansion of the public sphere after 1908 played a large role in the sporting scene as ethnoreligious communities organized sporting festivals to demonstrate the athletic prowess of their youth and unite members of the community. These festivals thereby contributed to the “creation of a shared identity” and, at the same time, led communities to develop similar conceptions of how such events should be organized and which values should be foregrounded. However, by the time of the CUP-led coup d’état of 1913, the Turkish press was already building a more exclusionary Turkish–Muslim understanding of who could represent the country, a topic explored in detail in Chapter 8. Turkish periodicals, for instance, portrayed the Empire as absent from the 1912 Olympic Games although two İstanbulite Armenians represented the country. Meanwhile, many Greek and Armenian athletes navigated multilayered identities, choosing whether to represent Greece/Greeks, the Empire, and Armenians in these events. The book ends with the outbreak of World War I, although Yıldız discusses continuities and discontinuities in the concluding chapter. He specifically emphasizes the further militarization of sports and continuation of some civic ties between sportsmen despite the hardening of divisions during the war.
Yıldız excels in demonstrating the forging of civic ties between ethnoreligious communities through sports, yet he delivers much less about the strength or uniqueness of such ties. Although he situates sports alongside other sites of intercommunal interaction in early twentieth-century İstanbul, he does not examine the similarities and differences between sports and venues such as coffeehouses. Likewise, although he highlights the global character of sports and physical education in the early twentieth century, the relationship between İstanbul’s sporting world and those of other cosmopolitan cities of the period remains underexplored. It is, thus, unclear whether civic ties between sportsmen differed from the ties forged between İstanbulites who frequently visited the coffeehouses. The reader is also left wondering if sportsmen of the other cosmopolitan cities of the world built similar ties. Although I am aware that the book is not a comparative study in essence, the arguments would have benefited from such comparisons to demonstrate why those ties mattered and if İstanbul was a unique case. The book’s temporal scope further complicates this issue. Ending his analysis with the outbreak of the war leaves little room for Yıldız to explore whether these civic ties were strong and resilient enough to survive the crystallization of intercommunal tensions. This analytical gap becomes particularly visible in his handling of the relationship between Selim Sırrı and Shavarsh Chrissian. Their centrality to building of the Ottoman world of sports is made clear throughout the book. Yıldız notes that despite their respective alignments with the CUP and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Sırrı and Chrissian addressed each other as “dear colleague” and frequently cooperated. Yet, when Chrissian fell victim to the atrocities of 1915, Sırrı remained completely silent. Did his loyalty to the CUP easily reduce a “dear colleague” to merely an “Armenian”? Examining this tragedy and silence, Yıldız does not raise the broader question of whether the civic bonds forged through sports were limited and easily fractured by political realities.
Another limitation relates to one of the book’s central arguments: after the Balkan Wars, the Turkish press took a further step toward defining Ottoman identity in terms of Turkishness. However, Yıldız does not apply the same framework to non-Turkish athletes. He finds no comparable “leap” or “novelty” either in İstanbulite Greek athletes competing for Greece at the 1912 Olympic Games or in Armenian journalists portraying Vahram Papazian and Migirdich Migirian as representatives exclusively of the Armenian community at those Games, despite Papazian’s insistence that he represented the Empire. Therefore, potential parallels between the CUP’s well-known turn toward Muslim–Turkish exclusivity and developments within other communities remain largely unexplored.
These issues notwithstanding, The Ottoman World of Sports achieves a great deal in demonstrating that the social and political transformation that the Empire went through in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered opportunities to its citizens to explore new venues to experiment with their identities. Furthermore, Yıldız’s emphasis on shared experiences and civic ties between İstanbul’s ethnoreligious communities prove that venues which contributed to the nation-building processes are not necessarily signs of an inevitable fallout. On the contrary, some may have cultivated and/or strengthened connections between communities. Therefore, the experience of Ottoman İstanbulites was more complicated than a story of increasing animosity between ethnoreligious communities. Rather, for them it was a period of experimentation, community building, and interaction via teams, clubs, and competitions. The consequences they witnessed during and after World War I were only one of the many possibilities. To conclude, I must note that, considering how scarce the English-language literature on sports in the late and post-Ottoman world, the book lays a promising foundation for further studies, specifically concerning the role that sports played in identity politics. Future studies have a valuable opportunity to build upon this book, elaborating on how sports reflected on or contributed to wider social and political changes through various lenses, such as the biographical histories of sportsmen like Sırrı and Papazian, or spatial histories of venues like Union Club Stadium.
